Bill Hill - There is only one space after a period

Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Mar 26th, 2004 @ 9:31 AM | 146,367 Views | 62 Comments

Formats:

Are you a one spacer or a two spacer? Bill Hill gives his opinion on why you only put one space after a period.

Rating:

GraemeF
GraemeF

My wife is a secretary and was trained on typewriters to put two spaces after a full stop, which she still does to this day.

Let's see if Bill can convince her to change her ways... I've had no luck so far.

thatis

according to my graphic designer friends, its 1 space only after a period. this is because the font designer takes all this into account and makes the space be the appropriate size between a period and start of the next sentence.

i got the opinion that the typewriter standard of 2 spaces drives them nuts because the uninformed are all still putting 2 spaces even when using a computer! Opps! (hehe)

njonsson
Bad hair life

One good thing that HTML did for us—turn period-space-space into period-space.

mochant

Depends, actually. When preparing text-only docs with a monospaced font (e.g. Courier), it's still a good idea to use two spaces. Otherwise, one space is the way to go as proportional fonts are designed to use the appropriate amount of space required by each character. (Confession: I'm a recovering graphic designer!)

mhawley

Well, I think I will try and train myself to not hit the space bar twice after a period. Its going to be a bit difficult I think, but we'll see how things go. BTW - Bill is hilarious.

jj5
Yeah. We got goth served.

I'm a 'one space' guy too.

I wanted to comment about underlining. It really annoys me when people do this on the web. An underline might be bad enough in 'normal' type-setting, but it's a link on the web.

I don't mind if you don't underline your links (provided they are obvious) but seriously, don't underline text that isn't a link!

It's just annoying.

John.

Stack Of Toast
There were build errors??

I've been trying to undo years of double spacing, but it's just so hard.... Mabey I should assign the double space as a hotkey combination for ActiveWords. That'll teach me.

WinInsider
Mike, MCAD

I am two space person. But there is a way in MS Word to use AutoCorrect to automatically replace ".__" with "._"

_ being a space.

This is my geeky solution Smiley

BTW

I look forward Bill's next video!

cmchavez

I definitely fall into the double-space category. Although after listening to Bill, I can see where things like this and underlining items definitely dates my typewriter training to my high school days.

I think now I will be more self-conscious of when I use formating tools like that.