Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Who knew?

… Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. - Slate Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

2 comments:

  1. However Bradbury and Evans did it for Charles Dickens is good enough for me: Hard Times.

    Looks like half spaces before semi colons and exclamation points rule as well as doubles following periods.

    Of course, none of this applies to poets. We have poetic license from the muses themselves.

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  2. This has been thoroughly refuted by those who know more about typographic history than I do. In my days working in the typography business (proofreader, markup guy, tech support), we spoke of two spaces after a period as "French bands", I think. It seems to me that the bias for single space only comes from the simplicity it offers the programmers, who now do not need to distinguish the spacing after an abbreviation from one after the end of sentence.

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