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At 01:50 PM 2/10/2005, John D. Berry wrote:
Paul --
Double-spacing after periods is a habit that began in the 19th century -- not a period noted for its fine typography! -- and has no justification whatsoever. I don't need to expound on the subject, however; it's already been done succinctly by Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style (2nd ed, pp 28–30):
"2.1.4 Use a single word space between sentences.
"In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. As a general rule, no more than a single space is required after a period, a colon or any other mark of punctuation. Larger spaces (e.g., en spaces) are themselves punctuation."
Being a poet and a scholar, Bringhurst goes on to mention one exception (probably not one that your discussion of text on the web is going to run into very often):
"The rule is usually altered, however, when setting classical Latin and Greek, romanized Sanskrit, phonetics or other kinds of texts in which sentences begin with lowercase letters. In the absence of a capital, a full en space (M/2) between sentences will generally be welcome." How you accomplish this in justified text, since the en space is a fixed space, is a job for a careful typesetter.
In a more general way, and for composition in metal type, Jan Tschichold set very high standards when he took over the re-design of Penguin Books in the late 1940s; he was sending jobs to virtually every typesetter and printer in Britain, and had to standardize the results that would come back. The very first section of his "Penguin Composition Rules" is titled "Text Composition" (1947) [with my notes in brackets]:
"All text composition should be as closely word-spaced as possible. As a rule, the spacing should be about a middle space or the thickness of an 'i' in the type size used. [This would be the width of the piece of type, including the built-in space around it, not just the visual width of the "i" itself.]
"Wide spaces should be strictly avoided. Words may be freely broken whenever necessary to avoid wide spacing, as breaking words is less harmful to the appearance of the page than too much space between words." [I usually add: try to avoid misleading word breaks, such as "rein-state," which can lead the reader to misread the sentence the first time through.]
"All major punctuation marks – full point, colon, and semicolon – should be followed by the same spacing as is used throughout the rest of the line."
It's worth noting that Tschichold also set a standard of adding a small space before colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points -- not a full word space, but a slight additional space, so the punctuation doesn't get subsumed into the word shape. I try to do this when I typeset text, and I wish more digital fonts were designed with extra sidebars around (or at least before) those punctuation marks. Obviously this extra space isn't needed before periods or commas, but I often run into automatic kerning pairs that would tuck the period or comma way too far under the overhanging part of a final letter like "r" or "y." Our mania for kerning sometimes creates more visual problems than it solves.
In all of these areas, the precise spacing needed to get the most readable text depends on the typeface used, of course. The spacing of the letters affects the spacing of the words affects the spacing of the lines, and so on all the way out to the margins of the page – and back again. Typography is all about space.
And now we'll see whether the fact that I've used italics and en dashes for clarity in this text – rather than the truncated "plain text" that I usually limit myself to in e-mail – breaks the system or not. I hope not.
John
:: :: ::
John D. Berry
book design & typography:
<http://home.earthlink.net/~typographer/>http://home.earthlink.net/~typographer/
dot-font:
<http://www.creativepro.com/author/home/951.html>http://www.creativepro.com/author/home/951.html
Contemporary Newspaper Design:
<http://www.markbattypublisher.com/servlet/book_view?number=17>http://www.markbattypublisher.com/servlet/book_view?number=17
Language Culture Type:
<http://www.atypi.org/10_Visitors/70_publications/50_LCT/>http://www.atypi.org/10_Visitors/70_publications/50_LCT/
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