How Many Spaces at the End of a Sentence? Microsoft Weighs In

Article Comments
42

In 1990, I bought Robin Williams’ book, “The Mac is not a Typewriter”. He said, “On a Macintosh (…) the characters are proportional; that is, they each take up a proportional amount of space - the letter I takes up about one-fifth the space of the letter m. So you no longer need extra spaces to separate sentences… Of course, this one-space rule applies just as well to the spacing after colons, semi-colons, question marks…or any other punctuation you can think of.”

So, since 1990, I’ve skipped all that double-spacing.

43

Yes of course! I love punctuation—hence my commenting on this thread. I was merely responding to a comment from Mark Nagata, who wrote:

Because the Japanese language has tons of characters, you can distinguish words easily, without a need of breaking words by spaces. The English language has only 26 characters, so you need spaces, without which you couldn’t distinguish words.

The reason that Japanese doesn’t (usually) use word breaks has nothing to do with being able to distinguish words. It has everything to do with history and culture.

44

Same here. I was taught to use 2 spaces after a period when I learned to type on an old manual. I’ve always just used one on the computer. I remember how hard you had to strike the keys on those old Underwoods. However, I read somewhere that there was a lower rate of repetitive strain injury.

45

Let’s be careful to attribute things where they belong. Bill Gates hasn’t had significant design interaction with Microsoft software in many, many years. He left day-to-day management of Microsoft in 2006 (and even then wouldn’t have been consulted about a feature as small as this), and even left the company’s board in 2017. I highly recommend watching the document Inside Bill’s Brain on Netflix.

As I said, it’s a matter of typographic style, and we’re allowed to have our opinions about style too. :-)

And just in case anyone else is confused, this Robin Williams is a woman. She’s thoroughly delightful, and while we see her all too infrequently, she lives in Santa Fe and Tonya and I got to spend an afternoon with her over Christmas while visiting relatives (and just before I got the flu).

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46

I remember enjoying the books by Robin Williams several decades ago, and learning from them. However, the quoted sentence, saying that having proportional characters means you no longer need extra space between sentences, seems illogical to me. Why would this assertion be true? It’s often offered as a tautology, and I don’t remember reading a meaningful explanation of it.

Newspapers, books, and magazines had used proportional spaced letters for centuries, AND had used a greater amount of space between sentences, by the time people began to advocate using a single space on a computer. I like that centuries-old typographic tradition, and I find it useful for rapidly parsing paragraphs. Other people don’t like it. In most cases, the reasons they offer don’t seem to use logic. That’s fine. Tastes vary.

47

The proportional space between sentences is greater than that between the letters in the words that surround it. But it is smaller than what two blank spaces the size of a M, the widest letter in a proportionally spaced English letter would be.

There’s a good explanation here that was set in monospaced fonts. It makes it obvious that proportional type is easier to read:

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48

Thanks for the link. It’s an interesting article.

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50

But it’s a lot harder to read and therefore it takes a lot longer to read. Good reason to use spaces. If you can’t be bothered to make it readable, I’m not going to be bothered to read it.

This is meant to be a reply to the all caps no spaces comment.

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51

I’ve been taught to always put a comma after things like ‘i.e.’ so I don’t have that problem…

52

I’m not in this “debate.” For me, it was two spaces with a typewriter and it is one space with a computer. Period.

53

Methinks English has always been an evolving language. Ye cockalorum, cease all this brabble; 'tis for naught. Meseems the double space may be archaic, yet is not wrong. Erelong, Microsoft will begin dinging rarely used or archaic words.

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54

I was always irritated that MS Word’s Australian spell-checker was actually closer to US than UK versions. Then I read (red:) Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue and found out most US spelling is closer to the original (19th century?) spelling and it is the UK that has diverged. I still set my spellchecker to UK!

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55

I gave the reason why there’s change from 2 to 1 space, the proportional type. Because the spacing is so even, there’s no need for 2 spaces. It took me about a week to get used to it and I’ve been typing that way for over 30 years. It looks better to the eyes, too. You don’t run up against that nasty double space; you just glide along.

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56

Ancient Latin had no spaces or punctuation—and is, and was, a bitch to read. Spaces and punctuation are a sign of evolution in the Latin languages. As for two spaces after a period, that’s a leftover from the monospaced fonts on typewriters. As computers use mostly variable width fonts, a single space is all that is needed. Read “The Mac Is Not A Typewriter”, by Robin Williams, the typesetter’s Bible.

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57

No, that’s a myth that got started in the 1950s. Typesetters have been putting extra-wide spaces between sentences since the dawn of typography. The standards have varied from place place and from time to time, but the idea that an inter-sentence space must be exactly the same width as an inter-word space is only about 100 years old, and the idea that everything else is objectively wrong is less than 50 years old.

See the article I cited at the very start of this thread:
Heraclitean River: Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history)

58

One may think of using two spaces after a period as a stylistic choice, but what it does in a layout is scream “amateur.” Printers, before computers, didn’t use two spaces when they were setting type. I have plenty of books that came out before computers and page layout programs. The rules of style didn’t come from computers. They came from printers who did their work the hard way, with lead type. The rules of style were adopted for and by computers. As Steve Jobs said, he learned them in a calligraphy class. That’s one of the uses of Open Type, to provide character choices that mimic calligraphy. Before Open Type, fonts were far more limited in their design choices. Now, the sky’s the limit.

The rules of style enhance usability and readability. You can see them as a restraint—if your creativity is limited, or as a guide for your creativity, if it is boundless. I won’t go into those rules here (beyond using one space after a period). There are plenty of style guides to consult. Among those, as I mentioned above, is The Mac Is Not A Typewriter, by Robin Willians. And no, she’s not a comedian, though her books are very readable. I think you’ll find that most professional layout designers know her work, and follow her rules.

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59

I have to say I’ve used both 1 space and 2 spaces after a period. For me it comes down to the typeface and clarity. There are simply times where I’m forced to use a typeface (that’s used in a corporate identity for instance) where the space looks more like half a space than a whole space.

Typically I’m a 1 space person though as under normal circumstances 2 spaces does not increase legibility.

60

That is a useful article, though it makes me look dull and misinformed. Other forms of punctuation, like the em-space, are hard to find on a computer, though they do exist, at least in some typefaces. Be that as it may, I’ve gotten used to the single space after a period and find double spacing, as in that article, distracting, except in am em-dash—which I find useful from time to time. And I know how to type it, which can’t be said for an em-space.

Like many others, I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and thus used double spaces after a period, which was the standard at the time, in the 1950s. When I started using a computer, I learned to use a single space. I concede that I am now prejudiced against the double space. Nevertheless, it’s good to know the history, as heraclitus lays out.

Still, today’s typographical standards favor the single space. Though there is no one to stop you using double spacing in your own documents. But if you wish to publish anything through a service bureau, your double spaces will probably be stripped out. As well, they may be specifically excluded from the style requirements of particular university courses that require extensive writing.

Which is to say, in some professional uses, double spaces may be deprecated, whatever your personal preferences may be. Of course, if you’re having your work published by a service bureau, you can direct them to retain you chosen spacing. Other contexts may not be so flexible.

As heraclitus (whomever he may be) demonstrated, on the web you can use whatever standard appeals to you. It’s interesting that he said he prefers a single space after a period, but he wrote his article using double spaces. I guess that was to poke a thumb in the proverbial eyes of the so-called single space fanatics, of which I apparently was one. I don’t think I was actually a fanatic. I just believed what I was taught when I learned to use PageMaker, Quark XPress and InDesign. My teachers would have marked me down had I used double spaces. Nevertheless, most of the style standards I leaned do serve good design.

These days radical design is popular. Though, to my mind, they often do not serve their primary purpose, which is to communicate with the viewer. Some may stop to puzzle it out, but most will fly on by with better things to do than decode an obscure design.

If you’re a good designer, clarity doesn’t have to be boring.

61

It is, and always was, a matter of style. By definition, what is “best” is in the mind of the typesetter and is not an objective truth.

What everybody liked in the 1700’s went out of fashion in the 1920’s and became taboo (if not the subject of abuse and ridicule) in the 1950’s. And in the future, today’s standards will fall by the wayside in favor of some other style.

In 2050, maybe publishers will decide to begin every paragraph with a 30-point drop-cap. Or sentences will alternate between serif and sans-serif fonts. And if they do, they’ll probably revise history and pretend that what we’re all doing today was never done and that anyone who denies it is an uneducated boor. But it will still be a matter of style, not any absolute universal truth, no matter what its proponents at the time may claim.

62

This is true, and it doesn’t only scream amateur. It’s also broadcasting that the author is, at the very least, an OK Boomer who refuses to admit there might be a more effective way to communicate in type and who cares more about what he or she likes rather than what is easier for everyone else to read. Two spaces make any document longer, and will be more prone to rivers. Especially if you justify the document, it will totally throw off 100% of the spacing.

Since the invention of writing thousands of years ago, documents were written with proportional spacing. When Gutenberg invented the printing press and movable type, the spacing was also proportional. It was only when the typewriter was invented thousands of years later, and monospacing was the only option, that the two spaces were recommended. And it’s why the vast majority of printed documents are created with proportional type today.