Re: Grammatical Sasquatch? Re: Grammatical foot in big mouth

[Elizabeth Ross <beth -at- VCUBED -dot- COM>]

Mary queries:
| Shouldn't there be only one space after the period rather than two?
| Back in the typewriter/cave man days, the two space was mandatory, but
| FrameMaker and other formatting beasts want to manage the spacing
| on their own, thank you very much, and toss the offending
| two-space-period incidents back in your face during spell check.
|
| Unless this is an Americanism?

Actually, this goes back to typesetting days. In the old days of lead type,
two spaces were used after a period. This convention carries over into
non-proportional fonts, such as Courier. When typesetting was invented and
proportional fonts began to be used, only a single space after a period was
inserted. When the layout program (FM, Quark, PM, etc) sees the period and
knows you are using a proportional font (Times, Palatino, Helvetica), it
will adjust the spacing to be correct. Hence, it is called proportional. If
you look closely and measure, the space following a period will be just a
tad wider than the space between words. Fixed-width fonts, such as Courier,
lack this feature. So even in layout software, technically Courier and other
fixed-width fonts should be formatted with two spaces after the period.

I find if I use two spaces after the period with the proportional fonts, I
end up with "rivers" of white space trickling through my paragraph instead
of the more pleasing even distribution of one space.

Hope this helps clarify things!

Elizabeth Ross
Technical Writer
V3 Semiconductor Corp.
beth -at- vcubed -dot- com
http://www.vcubed.com

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=