Hello Clarke, On Sat, Oct 04 2014 at 02:54:51 AM, Clarke Echols <cla...@verinet.net> wrote: > Two spaces at end of sentence is standard US usage on typewriters, and > has been for a century or longer. > > But when Microsoft came along with Word, they apparently decided to use > a single space that's the same as inter-word spacing. The book > printing industry hasn't always been consistent, from what I can tell, > but I found a magazine from 1950 where the spacing after the stop at > the end of the sentence is a bit wider than between words, though it's > hard to tell with spacing varied by left- and right-hand margins both > being adjusted.
Interesting. Most of the articles I found on the subject say that double-spacing after a full stop is bad, old-fashioned, and came only because typewriters used monospaced type and thus end of sentences where harder to spot. I found a few articles that defend the use of double-spacing and try to demonstrate that a wide space after a full stop was the usage 300 years ago in English books. Here are a some interesting links: http://theworldsgreatestbook.com/how-many-spaces-after-a-period/ http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324 > In the magazine, the end-of-sentence appears to be about 1.2 or perhaps > 1.4 times the word spacing. I use the groff ".ss" request to set my > end-of-sentence spacing to 1.66 times inter-word spacing. Thanks for the tip, I'll try this, or mom's .SS request. Regards, -- Bertrand Garrigues