I just got used to doing one space after the period! Oh well... don't plan on breaking that habit anytime soon. I just can't stand the huge space between words when there's a double space there.

APA = American Psychological Association. They recently published the 6th edition of their their manuscript publication guidelines which includes a lot of typographic recommendations, most of which are downright hilarious. There have been a lot of changes for the better in this edition, but going back to a double spaced period is a real head-scratcher. Even the average office admin knows better. You could do an entire thesis on validating the efficiency of these guidelines, but I believe someone has already published a paper on that.

Make them use TeX, which automatically strips out multiple spaces. (French spacing is allowed, though. That should appeal to a segment of the psychological community)

> Make them use TeX

There is already a apa LaTeX class that was written by Athanassios Protopapas (article in eutypon, pdf 400K).

It is interesting to read the author's comment on ctan http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/apa/

apa.cls is not in any way connected to, endorsed by, or probably known at all at the American Psychological Association. APA does not even accept manuscript submissions in LaTeX source. The author of apa.cls has made every effort to achieve typesetting results conforming to the APA manual, because he uses it for his manuscripts. However, he is not responsible if the editor does not approve of a manuscript typeset with apa.cls, if your computer blows up while processing your manuscript with apa.cls, or for anything else that may go wrong with apa.cls, or with anything else for that matter.

Athanassios Protopapas
protopap@ilsp.gr
December 2008

The samples they provide in their Basics of APA Style Tutorial all look like the kind of manuscripts that writers and journalists present to a book or magazine publisher (double-spaced, etc.).

Following up on Bert's comment, maybe the APA has decided to return to this very ingrained (in America, at least) typewriting-derived habit.

Also, I imagine that this manual isn't a book that graphic designers or typesetters usually consult. :-)

>That double space is a purely American habit

The practice of double spacing after periods is in the US known variously as "English" or "French" spacing, and has been common at one time in those countries, as well as the US. It is not an American habit today, as most style guides, I believe, are against it. The one Christopher refers to is an outlier. I also can't remember ever seeing printed material like that. It used to be standard practice in typewritten material, where it has some rationale.

For some of the story you can read the Wikipedia article on double spacing.

ps I see in Harry Carter's "View of Early Typography" that a hand manuscript of 1450 has wide spacing between sentences, and the famous Berner sheet of Garamond has many sentences spaced very widely.

> APA recommends double space after a period...

so? what's the big deal?

MLA Style (accepted style in the humanities disciplines) -- Modern Language Association -- calls for double-spacing

AP Style -- Associated Press -- calls for one space


Bill,

MLA: "As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor or editor requests that you do otherwise."

The break between one sentence and the next is already clearly indicated by not one but two conventions: a fullstop at the end of one sentence, and capitalisation of the beginning of the next. That's already one more indicator than most other textual divisions. There's absolutely no need to add a third indicator by doubling the word space.

A bunch of those rules in academic groups go back to mono spaced typewriter manuscripts - some people have not yet gotten used to the idea that a personal computer can set type.

"he is not responsible if the editor does not approve of a manuscript typeset with apa.cls, if your computer blows up while processing your manuscript with apa.cls, or for anything else that may go wrong with apa.cls, or with anything else for that matter."

@Michel Boyer
That is quite possibly the best disclaimer I have ever read. It should probably be the default disclaimer on any MS product :p

James Felici had an interesting article about double-spacing after periods recently on CreativePro.com:

http://www.creativepro.com/article/double-space-or-not-double-space

The practice goes very far back, before typewriters (and before America, for that matter).

I prefer one space mainly because using two creates unsightly holes and uneven color in text.

By the way, I'm wondering whether Jan Tschichold had an influence on killing the double spacing. His rules for Penguin have a single space after a sentence.

Or was it the advent of machine type setting? I can imagine that in hand composition justifying text by adjusting space between sentences might have been an easy and clean option.

With machine setting, I believe that adjustment of all word spaces in a line for purpose of justification became relatively quick and easy.

Or, for that matter, what is a "double-spaced" line?

As I mentioned before in a similar thread, kerning of the difficult cap-lowercase combinations (in Linotype two-letter "logotypes" at first) rendered "double spacing" unnecessary.

Previously, if only a single space occurred before a "T_o" or similar combination, that didn't sufficiently associate the capital with its word.

Even today, double-spacing improves the appearance of certain types that have kerning between the space and letter characters. For instance, when the period at the end of a sentence is kerned under an "f", and the following sentence begins with a T.

@all
In the world of APA papers where typophiles *do not* predominate, double spacing is whatever MS Word says it is.

Sweet Jesus, Ricardo, how could you say something like that!

It was the underscores that you used for emphasis, Dan. :-)

I remember typewriters (my dad's Olivetti, at least) being able to underline for emphasis. :P

But seriously, Dan, I will never, ever, make such a comparison again! :-)

The practice of using a single space after the period goes back to ye Olden Dayes of dedicated phototypesetting. These machines DID NOT strip double spaces so, in order to prevent the following scenario, a single space after a period became the norm.

If a single space following a period fell at the end of a line, the space became a line break. If a double space after a period came at the end of a line, one or the other of the spaces became a line break, which meant that there was an additional, unwanted space either at the end of the first line or at the beginning of the second.

Having people pop up out of nowhere to recommend TeX is like having Objectivists pop up out of nowhere to remind us what the only role of government is.

Also: Source on your recall statement, Christopher?

Also₂: HTML rules on whitespace collapse make it impossible to end a sentence with two spaces unless one or more of them is nonbreaking. In fact, you can end sentences with a hundred spaces, tabs, and carriage returns and they’ll all be collapsed to a single space (modulo certain CMSs and blog platforms that try to turn such runs into BRs).

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

Also₂: HTML rules on whitespace collapse make it impossible to end a sentence with two spaces unless one or more of them is nonbreaking

Except for the likes of <pre>, en space, em space, thin space, and the white-space CSS property…

@bowerbird

joeclark said:
>> HTML rules on whitespace collapse
>> make it impossible to end a sentence with two spaces
>> unless one or more of them is nonbreaking.

>when that beginning plainspace fell at the end of a line,
>the nonbreakingspace would be the first “character” on
>the next line,

The four per-em space is pretty close in width to the space. Two of them after the period does a pretty good job of approximating two spaces. In fact, I think a four per-em space followed by a six per-em space is right on the money width-wise but not sure.
Also, using the zero-width space might prevent the wrapping to the next line of the last space character that you observed. If it doesn't help, the only answer, I think, is to get CSS in on the act.
Try this:
&#8197;&#8197;&#8203;

I remember being taught to double-space after a period when typing. But that rule didn't apply to typesetting; there, space after punctuation marks was the same as normal space between words.

I do know that there was a British practice of spacing before a colon or a semicolon in typesetting, using a space much smaller than minimum wordspacing, which looks odd to North American eyes.

http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/pagenum/all/

Draft? Daft, me thinks. Waste of space!