On Fri, 16 Aug 2013 12:26:33 -0400, Felmon Davis <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, 16 Aug 2013, Bruce Carlson wrote:
An interesting observation Virgil.
When I went to school, mind you it was several lifetimes ago and in the
backwoods of the Australian outback so it may not be too relevant to
anywhere else on the planet but, I was told to always leave a double
space at the end of every sentence. That was with hand writing, before
typewriters were invented, at least there were none within several
hundred miles of where I grew up.
These days with modern word processors I just don't bother to even try
and insert two spaces at the end of sentences but I suppose I should,
it certainly looks nicer and may even be proper.
It would be nice if modern word processors at least provided the option
of a setting to do this automatically. Perhaps it should be the default
setting.
(please note no double spaces used in this text)
Cheers all,
Bruce Carlson
this whole discussion rather puzzles me. I'm out of it because I've
never heard of a rule requiring double spaces between sentences (born
and raised in the US).
esthetically double space insertion annoys me when I have to edit texts
but otherwise I don't notice so double spaces neither facilitate nor
inhibit reading as far as I am concerned.
but not to just prattle on about myself, I have pulled three texts from
a shelf, two are Oxford University and one is Johns Hopkins University.
no double spaces that I can discern. oh, here's one from MIT Press; no
double spaces. these are somewhat recent; here's an older volume from
Stanford University (1992), again, no double spacing.
I gather from Brian Barker's (and others') posts that this has something
to do with typewriters - is this a rule one learns by taking typewriter
classes? (learned on a typewriter but can't remember if I double-spaced
or not.) is it a rule applied to some special area of literature or
publication?
F.
I read somewhere fairly recently that double spacing between sentences was
for typewriters only. Apparently in printing the normal spacing between
sentences was equivalent to 1 1/4 or so spaces. One space looked wrong on
a typed page and two looked better. On computers, it is theoretically
possible to set the sentence spacing to mimic the normal printing spacing
so double spacing is not consider good practice on a computer. Those of us
who learned to type on a typewriter have to unlearn the habit.
I learned to type in the US and the double spacing was taught back in the
dark ages.
-----Original Message-----
From: Virgil Arrington [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, 16 August 2013 10:29 AM
To: James Knott; LibreOffice
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Can't find setting
I got my information from Robert Bringhurst's book "The Elements of
Typographic Style."
I have noticed that older books from the 19th century had wider spacing
after sentence ending punctuation. Newer books, say from the mid 20th
century on, seem to have narrower spacing between sentences.
Virgil
-----Original Message-----
From: James Knott
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2013 10:22 AM
To: LibreOffice
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Can't find setting
Virgil Arrington wrote:
The typographic standard is to only use one space between sentences
with proportionally spaced fonts.
In the old hand set type (which I have worked with) there were
different width spaces (en & em quads), depending on where they were
used.
Typically, an en quad was used between words and an em quad between
sentences. The names refer to the width of upper case N and M
characters. So, the space between words was as wide as an N and
between sentences, an M. There were also wider ones, such as double M
and triple M. Typesetting machines, such as the Linotype also had
provision for different width spaces.
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