Re: highlighting and fontification

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

"Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:

> 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.

It is still usual to consider email as based on fixed-width fonts (even if
XEmacs allow proportional fonts in many contexts, I've been told so :-).
Even if antique, fixed width fonts are still very actual.  And so the
double space convention, even for French.  This is how I learned to type
initially with mechanical typewriters, following French typing textbooks.

I guess conventions are often quoted out of context.  In usual typography,
printing articles and books, fixed fonts are rather unusual.  The single
space rule is more popular in that field, but it never meant that single
spacing is sufficient with fixed width fonts.

Whatever the rules are, we should keep in sight that the driving force is
legibility, much more than aesthetics.  Two spaces between sentences with
fixed width fonts is clearly more legible to me, this goes without saying.
With proportional fonts, the two-spaces rule is less meaningful, because
spaces are compressible and stretchable, and there are other compensating
devices ensuring good legibility nevertheless.

Let's take the simultaneous left-right justification.  It has been
demonstrated that for fixed width fonts, it hurts legibility and decreases
reading speed.  This is pure evil.  Some people consider it makes their
texts more graphically pleasing, which might be true, even if totally out
of place, because texts are written to be read, not admired.

Of course, everything else being equal, aesthetical texts are more
pleasing to read, and so, acquire a bit of legibility by being pleasing.
Proportional fonts allow for simultaneous left-right justification without
serious loss of legibility, so it is appropriate in this case.

But for fixed-text fonts, like in average email, or with document sources,
legibility is seriously hurt to start with, and then special care is much
more importantly taken wherever possible.  This is why it is especially
important to totally avoid simultaneous left-right justification, and to
use more space between sentences than between words.  Those relaxations,
which become acceptable with proportional fonts, are not fully welcome
for those still using/reading fixed width fonts, like for example, in email.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard