Period, space space capital letter
Double spacing, the bane of my existance. I am under the impression that it is a nasty hangover from the era of the typewriter, and all but banished from modern life. My girlfriend and I had a big conversation in the car the other day because I told her that "no-one double spaces any more", but she was told that it is standard receptionist/secretary practice. So after unlearning to double space, she now has to relearn to double space, and is sceptical of any more typographical advice from me!
So, two q's. Why the heck did double spacing originate, and why do offices continue to do so?
8.Feb.2005 1.40pm
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/27993.html
9.Feb.2005 7.08am
A somewhat related question. As some of you know I'm a beginner at the whole type design thing. I've been making punctuation marks (.,;:!?) with almost no left sidebearing and around 1/2 the width of the space character on the right. I then kern ." etc. Is this a bad thing? I like space between words to be smaller than between punctuation and a word, but not double the space. Should the font not force this on the designer or is it OK to do this?
9.Feb.2005 9.09am
Double spacing was used from the typewriter days when text was fixed spaced. Since the full stop (period) took the same space as a capital M it wasn't necessarily clear as to the end of a line. So too with a comma etc. Obviously now that typewriters are in the museum and most of us have left the world of DOS wordprocessors, ie all text is now proportionally spaced, then putting a double space after a full stop is no longer relevant.
9.Feb.2005 12.13pm
9.Feb.2005 12.41pm
Kris, I too have had this conversation, even with my in-laws. It's still very common. I get documents with this aberration contsantly. It's taught by people who learned to type on a typewriter and are now teaching typing to kids. Also, anything that makes a paper for school look longer will never totally go out of fashion.
9.Feb.2005 12.49pm
>> A somewhat related question. As some of you know I'm a beginner at the whole type design thing. I've been making punctuation marks (.,;:!?) with almost no left sidebearing and around 1/2 the width of the space character on the right. I then kern ." etc. Is this a bad thing? I like space between words to be smaller than between punctuation and a word, but not double the space. Should the font not force this on the designer or is it OK to do this? >>
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15.Dec.2005 11.59am
Here’s a discussion about double/single spacing on Blogdorf:
http://rosendorf.us/blogdorf/archive/2005/07/14/449.aspx
~
Theodore Rosendorf
http://rosendorf.us
15.Dec.2005 1.07pm
I could hear the conversation now: Honey what do you want to talk about? I don’t know, maybe about the King Kong movie? Nah, lets talk about double spacing after a period in setting text.
Lets see what word comes to mind - Nerd
15.Dec.2005 2.56pm
here is more about it, from a discussion we started on our blog. There was a good reason it was typography tip # 1 :-)
http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2005/11/03/488794.aspx
15.Dec.2005 3.00pm
I actually think being able to discuss typography with my boyfriend is a blessing. True, this doesn’t make us any less the nerds that we are.
15.Dec.2005 3.03pm
There is no more ardant dictator than a typing teacher. They have struck such fear in the hearts of those learning to type that the knee-jerk reaction holds true even today.
Here is the “old school” self-talk which takes place in the subconcious:
“If I don’t type two spaces, Miss Grunfelder is going to whack me with a ruler!”
ChrisL