<story><title>Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170/microsoft-word-two-spaces-period-error-correction-great-space-debate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielKehoe</author><text>We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an editor at O&amp;#x27;Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions with extra space after a period. Marc Andreessen (still at NCSA in 1993) pointed out browser developers couldn’t do the syntactic analysis required to distinguish the end of sentences from inter-sentence periods. Guido van Rossum (working on Python version 1.0 at the time) weighed in on the whitespace issue and complained “it’s mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this.” We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;1997.webhistory.org&amp;#x2F;www.lists&amp;#x2F;www-talk.1993q3&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;1997.webhistory.org&amp;#x2F;www.lists&amp;#x2F;www-talk.1993q3&amp;#x2F;index.h...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gaussian</author><text>A-ha! Another consequential web outcome decided in Urbana-Champaign. As an engineer and a writer, I have monitored this debate for some time. Editors of mine have usually lobbied for two spaces, while engineers I’ve worked with say, simply and reasonably, browsers reading HTML deprecate the extra space, so why bother? Now we know why. Thank you for the fascinating inside story. The traditionalist in me, however, the part that still enjoys a paper newspaper, will always prefer the luxuriousness of the double space.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170/microsoft-word-two-spaces-period-error-correction-great-space-debate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielKehoe</author><text>We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an editor at O&amp;#x27;Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions with extra space after a period. Marc Andreessen (still at NCSA in 1993) pointed out browser developers couldn’t do the syntactic analysis required to distinguish the end of sentences from inter-sentence periods. Guido van Rossum (working on Python version 1.0 at the time) weighed in on the whitespace issue and complained “it’s mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this.” We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;1997.webhistory.org&amp;#x2F;www.lists&amp;#x2F;www-talk.1993q3&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;1997.webhistory.org&amp;#x2F;www.lists&amp;#x2F;www-talk.1993q3&amp;#x2F;index.h...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>svat</author><text>One of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;I think most books don&amp;#x27;t do this any more&lt;/i&gt; [have wider spaces between sentences]. &lt;i&gt;Newspapers certainly don&amp;#x27;t. It&amp;#x27;s way too much trouble escaping out all the abbreviations.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you need wider spaces between sentences you also don&amp;#x27;t want them indiscriminately after every period, so you need to exercise more care and indicate them differently in the input markup. For example, using two spaces:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    This is a sentence.  This is another.  Dr. Smith wrote in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. about NASA.  It was good.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Or in TeX, which makes the typical case easier by using the heuristic that a period after a lowercase letter ends a sentence, you need to indicate wherever this heuristic fails (you can also use ~ to prevent a line-break):&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    This is a sentence. This is another. Dr.~Smith wrote in Proc.\ Amer.\ Math.\ Soc. about NASA\null. It was good.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Having to keep track of which periods are ends of sentences is a bit inconvenient in the general case, which explains why wider inter-sentence spacing was given up first in newspapers, then low-quality mass-publishing, then finally high-quality printing as well (almost). But typographers today (see my other comment) make it seem like this has always been the case and wider spaces was just a quirk from typewriters somehow!</text></comment>