> From: Michael Everson [mailto:everson@indigo.ie]
> Sent: 19 August 1999 20:03
>
> Good gods, what a horrible "solution". The _problem_ is that
> when they learned to type people (mostly North Americans)
> didn't learn the detail that there really _aren't_ supposed
> to be two spaces after a full stop, it is only TYPED there
> with MECHANICAL TYPEWRITERS on PAPER to help someone else
> actually set the page. In the modern world of electronic
> publishing, whether on one's own desktop or another's,
>
[snip]
>
> No, it's an artifact of bad training codified by someone who
> should have
> known better.
>
> Grrrrrrrrrr.
I'm either misunderstanding here or just confused. It seems to have
become an article of faith for many people that in 'real' printing there
are never two spaces (or, a larger space) after a full stop. But does
this 'rule' go back very far? Picking some random 'old' books, I find
that nineteenth and early-twentieth century books all use two spaces,
but that one space becomes common from about 1950 onwards. Is it just
part of some quest for the mythical 'uniform grey'? Post-war rationing
of spaces? Or does it have something to do with the pronouncements in
the Mac Bible, and _The Mac is not a Typewriter_? I know that's where I
found it :)
Nowadays I tend to use two in email / monospaced fonts, and one with
proportional fonts, but I'd really like to use about 1½-2 spaces, to
break up the uniform grey of the pages, so I think TeX's solution is
about perfect.
Anyway, I don't propose encoding this in Unicode, so I'll stay quiet,
unless someone wants to take this to TYPO-L...
yrs etc.
( al )
-- Alistair S. Vining Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge Tel.: +44 1223 520337 mailto:asv1000@hermes.cam.ac.uk mailto:al@heimdallr.u-net.com
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