On 10/17/06, Stephen Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Elements of Typographic Style, long regarded as a pretty
definitive text on all things typographic, cautions against such a
thing. To quote: "As a general rule, no more than a single space is
required after a period, colon or any other mark of punctuation."
I've avoided joining in to this one, but from my understanding, the reason the double space was ever adopted as a practise was because early typewriters didn't leave enough space after a period. Computer typefaces are smarter than that, so the extra space is no longer required for readable text.
Precisely. All manual typewriters used a fixed-width, monospaced font, which is the source of this problem. It was felt that a second space was needed after full-stops (periods, as you state-side folk insist on calling them – my wife certainly applies a very different definition there), as sentence breaks were not clearly enough defined.
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Kevin Futter
Webmaster, St. Bernard's College
http://www.sbc.melb.catholic.edu.au/
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