spacing

[Gloria Bickford]

there seems to be quite a bit of confusion in our office
about how many spaces to insert after punctuation at the
end of a sentence. Having gone to school for a certificate
in desktop publishing, I was told absolutely ONLY ONE
SPACE. Yet in the microsoft tools menu,it seems 1, or 2 is
acceptable. I was under the impression that the only
acceptable time to use 2 is if you are using a typewriter.

 

[Mike]

Perhaps you should try asking in the Word News Group, but for your info my
other half who is a Secretary says 2 spaces.

 

[Julie]

Perhaps MS is trying to accommodate the stubborn old-
timers. Or, there could be protocols in certain
professions or countries which call for two spaces. But I
am with you that one space is the standard, and should be,
if desktop publishing is to reflect the "look" of the
publishing industry.

 

[Jim Macklin]

Back to computers, you can use the find/replace function in
WORD (or other programs) to find and replace punctuation and
spaces.


message

there seems to be quite a bit of confusion in our office
about how many spaces to insert after punctuation at the
end of a sentence. Having gone to school for a certificate
in desktop publishing, I was told absolutely ONLY ONE
SPACE.

It is a question of style and aesthetics, outside the
competence of this
group. But a point I suggest is that it may depend on the
type face in
use. In many computer faces, the standard space is only an
n, and while
suitable between words, is too narrow for clarity at the end
of a
sentence. In 'hard metal' type-setting there used to be
'en' spaces
and 'em' spaces (twice the width, as with the letters) for
the two
purposes

When illustrating commands here, I tend to double up on
spaces where
they matter, to make quite sure that the items are clearly
separated
when seen in a proportional font

 

[Ken Blake]

there seems to be quite a bit of confusion in our office
about how many spaces to insert after punctuation at the
end of a sentence. Having gone to school for a certificate
in desktop publishing, I was told absolutely ONLY ONE
SPACE. Yet in the microsoft tools menu,it seems 1, or 2 is
acceptable. I was under the impression that the only
acceptable time to use 2 is if you are using a typewriter.

A generation of typists were taught to use two spaces between
sentences. That rule made a lot of sense back in the days when
everyone used a typewriter, because almost all typewriters used
monospaced fonts, and with a monospaced font, two spaces between
sentences more effectively separated them.

But with the introduction of computers, and the common use of
proportional fonts, that rule has gone by the wayside. The
proportional font by itself separates the sentences effectively,
and the value of the two spaces is largely gone. Using two spaces
results in a visual hole in the text and is now undesirable. Most
professional publications--books, newspapers, magazines,
etc.--use only a single space.

Unfortunately, however, there are still many people around who
were trained to type on typewriters and who don't realize that
the old rule is now inappropriate. Those include many
professional typists and secretaries.