HTML enforces the use of a single space to separate sentences. If
you want to add another space, you need to use
. I still remember how annoyed I was about
that. Back in the century in which I took my technical writing
course, two spaces were required. Of course, we weren't using
computers very often; hand-written sentences needed to appear more
separated than the words within.
I'm definitely not here to convince anyone to switch. Instead, I just want to share that I paid close attention to this detail when I was formulating my style guide for this blog. Should I continue with my out-of-date two-space habit? Or should I adopt the current convention?
I turned to Emacs itself for guidance. It turns out that the individuals who wrote Emacs comments, docstrings and help text used two spaces. Although many times they started each sentence on a new line.
It turns out that the content here mostly is one-space. I start out using two spaces in Org where most of this originates. But when I export to HTML, that second space vaporizes. That would seem like a bug to me.
The only place where you'll see evidence of my two-space style is in the comments and docstrings of my source code.
Am I the only person who nit picks about such details?
Thanks to Irreal for highlighting a customization from macosguru
6 comments:
I too learned to type on what we used to refer to in the twentieth century as a "typewriter." We were definitely taught to insert two spaces after the period terminating a sentence.
I always thought the reason was to make it easier for the reader to detect the boundaries of each sentence. I suppose it also made it easier to differentiate between the end of a sentence and an acronym that contained periods but that did not end the sentence.
I'm in the camp that thinks that whitespace improves the reading experience, so I like a bit of extra space at the end of sentences. If not two spaces, I'd prefer an em-space. Alternatively, we could replace the period character at the end of sentences with something less ambiguous, perhaps a bulls-eye character.
Incidentally, the other occasion we were taught that requires two spaces is before a ZIP code.
Thank you for much for affirming my memory of using two spaces to separate sentences. If you separated the sentences in your comment with two spaces, my blog's comment gadget eliminated one of them; I apologize for that.
I don't recall that two spaces were required in front of a ZIP code. But my last writing class was at the university level in an engineering program. I suppose we were expected to delegate addressing to Sales or the department secretary.
Export is initiated from Org with org-export-dispatch, and there's a function called org-string-clean-whitespace that aliases to string-clean-whitespace. It's not obvious how a regular user can alter its behavior. I suppose I could invoke (something like) a replace " ." with " ." but it's low on the priority list.
Of course I meant replace ". " with ". "
If you add `p { white-space: pre-wrap; }` to your CSS, it will preserve the spacing.
Most typographers prefer single-spaced sentences. I prefer double-spaced source so sentence navigation works in Emacs without getting stuck on abbreviations. If the source is double-spaced, and the browser collapses it to single space, the defaults are the best of both worlds!
Thank you very much for your perfectly cromulent suggestion!
I was taught in the mid-90s to use 2 spaces in word processors. I'm not sure when it fell out of use, but it always made sense to me.
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