I still have a fair bit of work to do on my thesis, but it is essentially done. That is to say, I’ve written all the important parts, and now I just need to go back and redo my graphs and look up some small details and the like. It’s a pretty big relief. I’ve started sleeping through the night again, stopped hallucinating… all sorts of normal goodness.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few days doing formatting, and then last night I was helping Wayfare write a cover letter for a job application. And she went through and put two spaces after every full stop. I asked why she bothered and we got into a big discussion of one space vs two. Turns out it’s a bit of a raging debate elsewhere <\/a>on the internet, too. <\/p>\n I’ll tell you this: I used to be a two-spacer, myself. It was what they taught us in middle school and even sometimes at the beginning of high school. It makes differentiating any old period and a full stop<\/a> easier (for example if a sentence were “e.g. the difference between a period and a full stop.” then the dots around the e.g. would not be full stops since they don’t end the sentence). <\/p>\n But then things changed, and computers came along. And let’s face it, two-spacing is a product of the typewriter era. The actual<\/i> standard is about 1.5 spaces after a period, if you go by what the professional typesetters have been doing all along. And that’s largely accomplished by having the period offset in your font so that there’s already half a space there, and then pressing the spacebar but once to finish it off.<\/p>\n Modern word processors will, for the most part, automagically adjust the kerning<\/a> to give the appropriate amount of space after a period. Usually that’s done by parsing the text to determine the end of the sentence: if there’s a period not followed by a capital letter, it’s probably an internal period. If it is followed by a capital letter (and not preceeded by an acronym such as Dr. and followed by a proper noun) then it’s probably the end of the sentence. Other software will ignore extra spaces entirely, such as HTML.<\/p>\n I’m also in favour of single-spacing because it meshes better with my typing sytle (no lingering on a space bar double-tap), and because it saves a tiny, tiny amount of bandwidth which can better be used on emoticons :) Also, while a double-space makes differentiating sentences easier, it breaks up paragraphs strangely, with larger-than-normal whitespace gaps appering in your wall of text.<\/p>\n But either way you choose to do it, it’s still a fairly minor thing, and I’m sure most (normal) people never notice one way or the other. I can almost guarantee you Wayfare will read this, shake her head, call me crazy, and continue to hammer out two spaces after every sentence.<\/p>\n Some choice quotes from the Wikipedia discussion on the topic:<\/p>\n Modern proportional fonts have what’s known as a “kerning table” that contains the optimum spacing for every possible combination of adjacent characters (including spaces). When authors create new fonts, they spend a lot of time compiling this information according to the actual shapes of their fonts’ characters. When you stick in an extra space after a sentence, you defeat this wonderful capability the font’s author worked so hard to include. But take heart: You’ve already made the far-more-challenging leap from typewriter to computer. (Well, I assume you have, if you’re reading this.) Learning to drop that anachronistic extra keystroke is child’s play by comparison. I know you can do it! \u00e2\u20ac\u201cAnder<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oh, apparently underlining for emphasis is also anachronistic, because italics and bolding are more professional ways of grabbing attention, whereas underlining was all you had available to you with a typewriter. While I still like underlining sometimes, I would generally agree, and it’s by far the most common thing you see in books\/newspapers. Plus, it frees up the underline as a way of setting off hyperlinks, which is also a slightly older tradition, but one I quite liked. Any idea where in my WordPress CSS I go to to turn that back on?<\/p>\n Also, does anyone remember the threat of  ? That’s the html code for a non-breaking space, and many WSIWYG HTML editors threw it around like it was free. Someone went through and started taking statistics of how many  ’s were out there relative to regular spaces. Now keep in mind that that’s 4 characters to transmit vs just one for a space. Anyhow, at the time (’99?) his statistics showed that the   represented something like 15-20% of all spaces, and that at the rate of growth at the time, up to 95% of total content<\/b> on the internet would solely consist of  ’s. I can’t find that page now, but it was hilarious. He was blaming the   and lazy WSIWYG webcoders for slowing down his internet connection… this whole double-space thing kind of reminds me of that (especially since people who want two spaces after a period are recommended to use a combination of a normal space and an  ).<\/p>\n Having settled that oddly petty dispute, I was going to go on to discuss how putting your toilet paper in so that it unfurled over-the-top was clearly superior, but it turns out Orson Scott Card<\/a> already settled that one for me.<\/p>\n Anyhow… back to my usual madness.<\/p>\n