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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.


-----Original Message-----
From: Virgil Arrington [mailto:cuyfalls@hotmail.com]
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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