From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 11:22:39 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net> References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net> Message-ID: Exactly -- just re-read Will's question. 2 spaces after punctuation is a fix-size typeface solution to the 1.5 typographer layout. I was referring to why typed papers were traditionally double spaced between the lines. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 11:02 AM Chris Torek wrote: > >I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > >used 2... who knows why? :). > > Typewriters. > > In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, > we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- > sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than > the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get > stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. Note that this is > all in the variable-pitch font world. > > Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the > 1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2. > > Chris > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: