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Subject:Re: Spacing after a period... From:Dick Margulis <dmarguli -at- CLDX -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 2 Jul 1997 07:44:45 -0400
Weirg wrote:
>
> Which is correct? One space after a period or two spaces after a period
> before starting the next sentence.
>
Glenn,
Please allow me to demur from the seemingly absolutist consensus that
one is the only answer.
Real life is more complicated than that. Different publishing houses and
different book designers have established their own standard styles over
the years, and while it is true that USUALLY the best practice is to use
a single spaceband (meaning a soft space that varies in absolute width
when setting justified text but that takes a nominal value of a third of
an em - varying somewhat between fonts - in unjustified text, that is
not always the case for technical work.
If you are working on engineering documents, you may find that your
customers would rather sacrifice the esthetic value of a uniformly
colored page for the practical aid of being able to find the fourth
sentence in the paragraph quickly during a review meeting. They also
like to be able to distinguish between the full stop at the end of a
sentence and the point that may sit at the end of a section reference
("See Section 3.2.4."); and the extra space between sentences helps them
do this.
In other cases, the customer's style calls for a fixed space (typically
an em) at the end of a sentence. This is a holdover from Linotype days,
when the compositor knew where the line ended. It is a mite trickier
when a computer is deciding on line breaks, as you do not want an em
space as the last character of a justified line - nor do you want to
prohibit lines from ending with a period; so try to talk the customer
out of this one.
Just my two cents' worth.
Dick Margulis
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