The 9 Guys - Who We Are

Are you a one spacer or a two spacer? Bill Hill gives his opinion on why you only put one space after a period. This video was shot in 2004.
We will miss you, Bill. Thank you for changing the world for the better when it comes to reading on digital devices. Rest in peace.
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.
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.
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
BTW
I look forward Bill's next video!
Me too. Underlined links, or more precisely, links that don't obey the browser's Underline links setting (which I set to "Hover", btw) are my pet usability peeve because I have difficult reading underlined text.
Bill's right, by the way. Underlining came about because it wasn't feasible to put
italics on a typewriter, and two spaces after periods came about because typewriters only had one size "space", and thus, couldn't duplicate an "em" space.
--Jim.
A couple of months ago I was asked to review an internal memo by one of our group managers. I sent him assorted feedback, but the biggest thing I pointed out was the need for a single space after each period. He was actually using three!
When my GM pushed me for a reason, I told basically the same thing that Bill said: go to your bookshelf, pull a book, and count the number of spaces. You'll only find one.
If Bill's comments above fascinate you, I suggest checking out the book The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. It's a great and fun introduction to the world of typography, and yes, there's even a discussion on spaces after periods.
I'm defiantly a two spacer. Most of what I type is unformatted monospaced text (code and email) and when I do format things it is in some thing that doesn't care such as LaTeX. When I type things in I intend them to be interpreted as data (I don't use Word)
before they are displayed. The computer should do the work of figuring out how it should be set to look nice. Meanwhile while it is still monospaced code, it has nicely separated sentences.
http://webpages.charter.net/fryguybob/blog/#108134396402036829
It is surely self evident that there should only be one space after a full stop. But what do I know!
Murph (very very English)
... we have powerfull corporations and their Product Branding and Marketting teams (with good intentions) bastardizing the basic rules of standardized and simple English sentence structure.
I love the DOT-NET technology, but the DOT-NET product branding is destroying the written form and use of the english language in the technical journals.
Here is an example sentence from the Editor's Note of MSDN Magazine, Paragraph 2 - sentence 2, April 2004 Vol 19 NO 4
"Leading off, we'll explain to you the fundamentals of code coverage in .NET. Code coverage is a way to make sure that all parts of your application are tested propertly -- it doesn't determine that they work properly, just hat they're covered by your test
suite."
The above use of '.NET.' basically invalidates ALL of Bill Hills arguements.
We already have _exceptions_ to the rules with 1.2.3.4 version numbers embedded in sentences.. now we have sentences STARTING with periods preceding Nouns. ;(
This is one reason why Homo Sapiens will never evolve beyond version 1.0.
bill hill wrote:
For proportionally-spaced fonts (that's what we call non-fixed-space) two spaces is ugly, and slows the flow.
bill hill wrote:
Bringhurst's book is excellent; no, it's not just about literature.
The 5.6.4.43 release of the .rc files suck. When will they finally release the 6.2 version? "Some time next month!" says the go-tool.net website. .POWER is a useful tool, but really, there are too many bugs to release it. And don't get me started on
the lack of features-- phew!
bill hill wrote:
Not just at the ends of sentences, but extra spaces between words. They can be hard to spot, but when proportional spacing kicks in to break a line in the right place, they often jump right out at you. And you won't even know they're there until they do - which on the screen can depend on the size to which the person reading your text has scaled a window. Point is, you have no control.
bill hill wrote:
It's called "The Magic of Reading". Or else I'll just post it in dribs and drabs
GC.Collect(-1); // won't work in VS.NET ver. 7.1.
Did you slow down even. a bit, while reading the. technical text above? People don't realize that a sentence. has finished, when they. see a fullstop. At least. I think so.
Cheers,
Stoyan
bill hill wrote:For proportionally-spaced fonts (that's what we call non-fixed-space) two spaces is ugly, and slows the flow.
jaraco wrote:
bill hill wrote: For proportionally-spaced fonts (that's what we call non-fixed-space) two spaces is ugly, and slows the flow.
...
So far, there have been several arguments for the legitimacy of double-spacing.
...
Some have claimed that "reading" that extra space takes extra time, but that can only be the case for someone who reads character by character, and I'll guarantee that 99% of the population does not read that way. The fastest readers don't even parse the text word by word, but rather in grammatical and structural chunks.
I'd like to hear an argument for single spacing more than "it's old and we don't have to do it anymore" or "I don't like it".
Time for a new poll, I wonder?
Two spacer here.
Then again, I still refer to the Enter key as "Carriage Return," I believe lines should terminate at 80 characters as God and Herman Hollerith intended, and I expect Ctrl-G to physically ring a metal bell.
There are two books I'd highly recommend to anyone trying to understand the arcane world of type and why it's done the way it's done.
They're both published by the firm of Hartley & Marks - which I believe also publishes Bringhurst's book.
The first is called, appropriately enough, "Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type", by Geoffrey Dowding. It's short - only about 85 pages, but it's a great read. the first time I read it I couldn't put it down, and my copy has notes all over it.
(OK, I'm the kind of warped and twisted individual who cares deeply about this stuff, I admit it...)
The second book is "The Form of the Book", by Jan Tschichold (I'm at home, my copy of this is in the office, I had to do a Websearch to make sure I spelled it right, since it's a real challenge. Pronouncing it right is an even bigger challenge. Sounds a bit
like a sneeze)
Tschichold's story is a really interesting one and highly relevant. He was, in his youth, a typographic rebel. "All text should be set in sans serif, we don't need serifs or indents at the start of paragraphs, etc etc in these modern times" (1930s).
In fact, he was actually jailed by the Nazis for being a"typographic subversive". In the same way as they tried to stamp out modern art, they tried to stamp out typographic innovation. Everything must be set in Aryan fashion - gothic blackletter. "Ve haf vays
of making you not read..."
Point is, Tschichold questioned every single typographic convention. When he got out of detention after six weeks, he left Germany for neutral Switzerland. Eventually he became the typographic expert at Penguin Books in London, at a time when it was the largest
paperback company in the world.
When he wrote this book many years later, he had returned to all the conventions he once eschewed - not because he'd gotten old and boring, but, having questioned them, he came round to understanding that they had existed for such a long time because they worked.
Sorry for the history lesson, but you can't separate type from its history. We've been doing writing systems as a race for 5500 years, and typesetting for almost 1000 (the Koreans had movable clay type in the year 1024. Gutenberg - often erroneously credited
with inventing printing, was a goldsmith and metallurgist. He invented an alloy and a method of casting as many copies of any letter as you wanted, an ink which would stick to the metal, and a press with sufficient pressure to take many impressions off the
inked type. His mechanized technology makes him the Henry Ford of printing, not the inventor).
Oh, BTW, I'd much prefer to post in justified text - but the justification in this edit window sucks big-time because there's no hyphenation. Without hyphenation, justification is totally unjustified.
Ambrose suggests that the font designers fix their fonts to match "the typing habits of the world". Say, Ambrose, have you ever looked at how a font is designed, structured and used? How would you propose changing all font technology to accomplish this?
bill hill wrote:Oh, BTW, I'd much prefer to post in justified text - but the justification in this edit window sucks big-time because there's no hyphenation. Without hyphenation, justification is totally unjustified.
I've been a staunch double-spacer since my seventh-grade typing class, have been known to reformat text to correspond with this. This whole thread has been quite interesting; I've known Bill for a while, and his opinions on typography carry a lot of weight
with me. Whipping out a ruler and opening the nearest book convinced me that I've been reading single-spaced text just fine for probably my whole life, even though I didn't realize it. Further, it turns out my
wife converted to single-spacing years ago when she became a technical writer (I'd fathered children with a single-spacer
without even knowing it!)
What's most surprising to me is that I've converted over with relative ease -- I'd have thought that this would be hard-wired into my genes at this point, but I guess the brain is pretty good at adapting.
Interestingly, I've also converted to single-spacing my mono-sized code comments, and to no ill effect that I can see. I believe that a lot of these objections about "too many dots" are overblown, though I reserve the right to double-space if I feel it's absolutely
necessary.
All in all, I'm a convert.
jaraco wrote:
Could you explain how proportionally-spaced fonts has any bearing on the number of spaces to follow a sentence? On the surface, the spacing of fonts seems as if it could affect the spacing after a sentence, but I don't see anywhere that it does.
jaraco wrote:
Some have claimed that "reading" that extra space takes extra time, but that can only be the case for someone who reads character by character, and I'll guarantee that 99% of the population does not read that way. The fastest readers don't even parse the text word by word, but rather in grammatical and structural chunks.
Re: Suzetta's post of 5/18
Perhaps it's because I've been reading voraciously for almost 40 years now, but I can't remember the last time I felt 'threatened' by a block of text. Content, yes, but just the look of it? No.
Conversely, because I am so used to reading fairly quickly (though I admit I do still hear the words in my head), I found the two-space version of your paragraph irritating compared to the more familiar one-space version. I mean irritating like a mental itch,
not irritating like a pet peeve. The visual interruption was rather like listening to someone with a silent stutter--waiting for the next thought made me more and more impatient.
One thing I think people misunderstand when they advocate for two spaces is that a paragraph is a series of connected thoughts, not just a collection of discreet statements. When the flow of those connected thoughts is interrupted visually, it is also interrupted
mentally and therefore harder to follow. This is true for me, and I believe it would be true for most people who are comfortable with written language.
For context, I am a technical editor with a background in writing and editing newsletter articles and marketing material. And as you can see, I am also a firm believer in single spaces after a period. Besides improving readability, it saves time and keystrokes!
What I find interesting here is that some people are saying it's bad because
it's antiquated. There's a funny "rule" we have that says "Don't use prepositions at the end of sentences." Well why not? It's completely arbitrary. But they still force it on us. Why? Because it's the nature of language. So, why do so many of us
still double-space between sentences? Because it's the nature of society to perpetuate practices as long as they have no ill effects.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, a ton of the confusion comes from the difference between term-paper writing and book publishing. You see, in my days in school, any paper we wrote would be left-aligned, double-spaced (line spacing), lots of header crap, centered
unadorned title, name + page numbers on all but the first page, indent every paragraph, MLA style references. Really the important point there was left-aligned. I don't recall ever having read a book that was left-aligned. They're all fully justified.
As far as writing my papers goes, Word makes absolutely no spacing decisions, other than when to word-wrap and whatever comes as part of the font. Because it's
left-aligned. If I wanted justified, I would single space. Because then things
do get wacky.
Here's some reasons I double space...
- when I search for a sentence, I rely on greater spacing (legally blind here)
- when I read something left-aligned I feel unfulfilled if it's single-spaced
- because it's the way I've always done it, and since there is nothing evil about it, there's no reason to stop now
I'd also like to affirm whoever said that everyone reads by pattern-recognition. That's actually why I'd never teach a kid by "phonics," because it just wouldn't work. But that doesn't mean we don't interperet punctuation. Like the period in illogical places,
we notice. Like a contraction with no apostrophe, wed notice. We'd read it right, but we'd notice. So to my linguistic mind, it makes perfect sense to have two spaces in left-aligned documents as a secondary end-of-thought marker. Especially if we're going
to read out loud.
Interesting thought, before I go: In books and newspapers, ever come across the line you couldn't read? I have. And it's because the spacing failed. Miserably.
Bill,
On your point of never using underlines, I agree completely.
On your point of never using double spaces after a full-stop, I must disagree. Other users have given several good reasons for using double spaces, all of which I agree with.
In addition, I hate reading a professionally typeset, proportionally-spaced sentence which ends with something like "Washington, D.C." and whose next sentence starts with a proper noun. Without the double-space I can't always tell if the first sentence has
ended. Just the other day I ran across such a sentence and had to stop and re-read it
three times in order to parse it correctly!
Also, if all of these great typesetting rules have stuck around for a reason (ie, they work), they why is the rule about double-spacing suddenly bad? Didn't it work for all these years? Does it have no value?
Of course, you're quite possibly correct to draw a distinction between mono-spaced and proportionally-spaced type. I think that in my case, my eye is trained to expect to see double spaces in mono type, while at the same time is used to whatever standard is
used in professional typography (single spacing, apparently). I see no reason why the two can't co-exist peacefully, esp. as a computer should be able to convert between the two. (BTW, can't typographers come up with a solution to my "...Washington, D.C.
Bush..." problem?)
Even though I'm not a typographer, I still care deeply about this stuff. You can aruge about it until you're blue in the face, but I'll need a better reason to change my habits.
Incidentally, I was taught both rules (not underlining, and using double spaces) in school. Not that that proves their correctness, mind you, but it certainly makes my worldview a little more satisfying.
Grammar has necessarily conservative conventions. Of course, conventions should be reviewed for purpose and effect. The purpose for spacing is for improved readability, or faster comprehension. As an example, youcouldstringwordswithoutspacing.
This lack of spacing between words slows comprehension, because you have to separate each word mentally. Each word represents a discrete idea. Extending this spacing concept as a method of compartmentalizing discrete ideas for faster comprehension, a period
and double-spacing aid comprehension by separating one complete thought, or sentence, from another, which gives reason to pause and consider its plausibility.
or you could get extreme (you rebel, you) and abandon grammar altogether like e e cummings and adopt a stream of consciousness just dont expect others to understand you better good luck
Cheers,
Jason
Did you konw taht the hmuan biran can raed wrods no mtater waht odrer the lteters are in as lnog as the fisrt and lsat lteters are croerct?
Yes, it is pattern recognition. Single and double spacing after a full stop is just a variation on this. What you are "used" to will always "the right way for me".
Habit can be your friend, and with only a little effort you can change any habit. I used to be a "two spacer", but converted. Actually it can also speed up one's typing as well. Think of all those extra space bar hits your poor thumb doesn't have to perform.
I have to admit though, the dual examples did seem to come across clearer with the two spaces. Hmmm, maybe I need to re-think my habits.
Intrigued wrote:*Now, look over both paragraphs a few times and see how your eyes catch on the double-space at the end of the sentences in the double-spaced paragraph? I believe this also gives one's mind a tad more time to consume each sentence.
There are three main conventions relating to the number of spaces used to separate sentences within the same paragraph:
We are now trying to do some entity extraction from text and cannot do it easily because of the conversion to one space after a period from two. It is difficult to determine if a period is after an abbreviation vs the end of a sentence. I vote for 2 spaces after a period if the period is ending a sentence for this very reason!
Sean
@manotype: Search and replace for two spaces to replace them to one. Then, search and replace period space with period space space.
Opening these comments, as Bill's videos are getting viewed again
I didn't even know this was a debate. I just assumed the people using 1 space didn't know or didn't care that the standard was two spaces.
I want to use two space, I really do. But our doc and UX people shout at me when I do that, so I kind of got out of the habit. WIth all respect to Bill, his main argument is "good typographers say this and that so there". I've never actually heard a good argument for using only one space after a full stop (period).
Using two spaces is better, and it's actually important now than in the days of typewriters. Why? Because with the proportional fonts we use these days, the space is typically narrower than in monospaced fonts (where the space if obviously the full with of a character), so a single space is not as effective at giving the "that sentence is done, here's the next one" message. The full stop should do that, yes, but it's often missed or ignored as a printing artifact or mark on the screen.
It seems like a small thing but if it alters the meaning of a piece of text because the reader doesn't realise they're now looking at a different sentence then the text has failed to do its job.
RIP Bill, one of the most memorable characters on Channel 9.
I am so late to this thread, but I do want to add my $0.02 to the mix.
I was a typographer in the pre-Mac/page-layout days, and wrote with a typewriter before that. I agree with the other posters that there should be one space only after a period with just ONE exception.
Typewriters, with the exception of the IBM Selectric, required two spaces because they all were monospaced characters. The Selectric was the first with proportional fonts and required only one space. In typography I learned the rules that held for over a hundred years: Two spaces for monospaced fonts, one for proportional. When creating left-and-right-justified type, the rule was one space no matter what, because the machine varied the spaces to make the left and right sides straight and two spaces there would make it look horrible.
Now only newspapers (and not all of them) and some magazines use left-and-right justified so the original rule holds. Never use two spaces unless you are typing in Courier or equivalent and your column is left-justified. Double-justified (which we used to call simply "justified") is never, ever used in web pages except for a special effect because of how bad it looks on our low-resolution screens (compared to printed pages).