Re: highlighting and fontification

["Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Excerpts from mail: (13-Sep-99) Re: highlighting and fontification by Mick Gower
>>> A couple of others that I can think of: American typography
>>> (typographical convention) puts two spaces after the punctuation that
>>> ends a sentence, European typography tends to use only one[1].
>
>> Jan Tschichold recommends putting an extra space after a such a
>> punctuation (except for very dense lines, of course). So this isn't a
>> purely American convention.
>
> The British Military had a manual for typography and that, IIRC, is two
> spaces after the and of a sentence ie after full stop, question mark
> and exclamation mark and one space after a break in a sentence ie after
> a comma or semi-colon. I think the manual was known as the JSP101.

For what it's worth, it's not cut and dry here in the U.S. either, despite
what the Rat says.

According to MLA (Modern Language Association) guidelines (the standard most
universities follow), either one or two spaces are permissible following
end-of-sentence punctuation when typing a paper. Neither one nor two is
stated as the preferred choice.

However, other guidelines, such as the APA (American Psychological
Association) style, require only a single space after end-of-sentence
punctuation.

Personally, I believe that having two spaces at the end of a sentence is an
antiquated convention born in an era of typewriters and fixed-width fonts.
With the advent of computers and proportional spacing, the two-space
convention is virtually useless and people are moving away from it.
Professional typesetting for books, etc. has never followed it to begin with.
Pick up any book, and you won't find the spacing between sentences to be any
larger than the spacing between words.

The above information concerning the MLA and APA styles was obtained from _A
Writer's Reference_, 4th Edition, by Diane Hacker.