a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by theadvancedapes
theadvancedapes  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Never Put Two Spaces After A Period - Business Insider

I've always been an avid two-spacer. My English teacher taught me that in high school and I never questioned it. Just assumed to keep using two-spaces. I've never been called out in it in my writing, whether that be online, in work, or in university. I can understand why some people prefer one space. Doesn't seem like a big deal to me though, I think it should just be a matter of preference.

On a completely unrelated note, a video with basically the hubski logo was at the end of the article:





user-inactivated  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've always used two spaces since I was taught to type in third grade, but a couple of months ago, I installed Lyx, intending to start to use LaTeX. Part of the settings are that it prevents two spaces at the end of a sentence, and will literally say "two spaces disallowed" or something like that because I guess it handles spacing automatically. I pretty quickly dropped my two-space habit, and now I'm happy that I did because it gains me a teensy bit of time. Marginal gains, but still, a gain's a gain. Now, hitting the space bar twice feels unnatural and redundant.

JackTheBandit  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Similar story to yours. The article seems to have a sort of humorous tone to it, but it was interesting to read it presented as a natural law, like this is information critical to the foundations of human communication.

theadvancedapes  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Haha, ya. The Manual of Typography, with all-due-respect, isn't exactly revealing a critical flaw to how we self-organize and share information. I'm using two-spaces now. Can you still understand me? Are you perturbed by the extra space so much that I become incomprehensible?

user-inactivated  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

FYI, the two spaces become one space in your comment due to HTML's "feature" of automatic concatenation of spaces in p tags.

  <pre>        </pre>
would preserve the space.

If you check the source of this page, you'll see that the spaces are actually there, and it's not Hubski's fault (as I had first assumed when I realized that spaces were concatenated on this site).

theadvancedapes  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh that's interesting. I've never even noticed that. To be honest, I just don't care about the two-space or one-space thing. I'm cool with either.

user-inactivated  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, same, it seems that most people don't actually care, but the people that do care are quite vocal about their stance for whatever reason. I guess like editor wars, but for English teachers?

theadvancedapes  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ya I suppose. It's kind of funny to read/hear people get so passionate for something so trivial.

BLOB_CASTLE  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I noticed that too and debated posting it.

bonjourdemain  ·  3948 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ha, that's exactly what I thought and I just assumed that's what it was until I read the title of the video.