Space between sentences--Eureka! the source of confusion

[Dick Margulis <ampersandvirgule -at- WORLDNET -dot- ATT -dot- NET>]

Folks,

[This is long and chock full of both fact and opinion. Read at your own
risk. If you don't care about typography and don't want to learn
anything, please delete the post rather than flaming me. Thank you.]

I believe I have just found one of the primary sources that has
engendered so much heat and wasted bandwidth on this list concerning the
"right" amount of space between sentences.

Here is paragraph 2.36.1. from the 1959 edition of the _United States
Government Printing Office Style Manual_:

"To aid readability, an em quad (or double space) is used at the end of
a sentence.  This applies to all types of composition, and includes
Teletypesetter, reproduction, and other printing.  Unless otherwise
specified, this rule will apply."

Now I have no reason to suppose that this paragraph originated in the
1959 edition or that it was retired in that year. I assume it started in
a much earler edition and survived for some time--perhaps survives to
this day.

So those people who have been conditioned to view the federal government
as the ultimate authority on everything will no doubt go to their graves
insisting that this is THE RULE.

However, French spacing, as this practice is called, fell into disfavor
in this country in the early part of this century. The Arts and Crafts
movement, following the lead of the great British typographer and artist
William Morris, propounded the esthetic that a uniform color on the page
was more important than readability. This led to a reversion to the
medieval (manuscript) and Renaissance (moveable type) models of uniform
spacing throughout the line (so-called English spacing).

I have books and other printed samples on my shelf from 1473 to the
present and reproductions of earlier books and manuscripts. I've been
sampling them with my eye peeled for sentence spacing trends.

What I've found is that from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-1960s
both spacing systems coexisted. I would say that French (i.e., wide)
spacing predominated in the nineteenth century and that English spacing
has predominated since. By that I mean that in the nineteenth century I
have examples of French spacing occurring in works of fiction as well as
reference and scientific books but that in the more recent era I find no
examples in fiction (may just be my limited sample) and I find both
French and English spacing used in scientific and reference works.

In my own experience in the 1970s, no American publisher was still
requesting French spacing; and the British publisher (a university
press) that requested it asked for an en quad rather than an em quad
between sentences.

TYPESETTING VS TYPEWRITING

Type traces its letterforms and conventions, in a historically coherent
way, to the earliest calligraphic forms. This may not be obvious from
the cursory examination of, say, Arial Black; but any history of type
will confirm the assertion. A key transition was from the highly evolved
calligraphy of the monastic scribes to the earliest moveable types.

Typewriting evolved, on the other hand, not in an esthetic tradition but
in a commercial tradition. The purpose of the typewriter was to improve
the efficiency of the amanuensis, the secretary, the clerk, in a
business office. (Perhaps you know some business people who are more
interested in money than in art.)

At no time was the typewriter seen as a replacement for typography. It
was seen, rather, as a way to prepare legible letters and invoices, and
later as a way to prepare legible manuscripts for the printer.

The typewriter has a limited character set, making it easy to instruct
people in its use. Secretarial schools sprung up, in which people sought
the most efficient way to teach unskilled people to do an adequate job
of typing, so they could get jobs in offices. In this situation, a key
efficiency was gained by establishing uniform rules for typing,
including the rule for double-spacing after a sentence.

The key thing to keep in mind, though, is that all of the conventions
and rules that pertain to typing evolved after the invention of the
typewriter and have absolutely nothing to do with the much older
conventions of typesetting.

Typewriting, and the associated secretarial conventions, evolved into
word processing with the introduction of automatic typewriters. The
first models were ordinary electric typewriters with enough memory to
enable some simple word correction and line correction features,
followed by paragraph correction. A few typewriters (the IBM Executive
was the first) enabled proportional spacing, it is true, but these were
still typewriters, not typesetting machines in any conventional sense.
The Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer was an early attempt to make a silk
purse out of a sow's ear, but it was still a typewriter at heart.

Word processing, bases as it is in secretarial practices and
conventions, evolved, with the introduction of the Macintosh and the
Apple LaserWriter, to make use of digital fonts. Some people who had
been doing technical writing using word processors (either for
on-the-cheap in-house reproduction or for submission to a compositor for
real typesetting) then began generating camera-ready copy on their
own--still carrying forward mostly secretarial typing styles.

Meanwhile, on a contemporaneous but entirely separate track,
manufacturers of typesetting equipment were embracing the computer age
with progressively more electronic systems, beginning with paper
tape-driven Linotype machines, moving to film fonts (rather than brass
matrices), thence to digital typography. Their software was based on the
long tradition of typographic conventions, not on secretarial practice.

THE AGE OF DESKTOP PUBLISHING

Desktop publishing systems--which they trace their heritage to the
aesthetic traditions of typography, not the pragmatic traditions of
typing--are a simplified version of sophisticated professional
composition systems. You cannot do everything in PageMaker, FrameMaker,
Quark, or Interleaf that you can do on a Penta system, for example, or
in LaTeX. One of the thing they cannot do is handle French spacing
automatically. If an en or em quad follow a period comes at the end of a
line, there will be white space at the end of the line. If the line ends
with a period, the quad will appear at the beginning of the following
line. Double spacing works no better, with the second space sometimes
appearing as a small indent on the following line.

Systems with a word processing heritage (such as Word) have a limited
overlap with desktop publishing systems, but they do not really attempt
to do the same things. Nonetheless, they do not handle any form of
French spacing, either true (with a quad) or pseudo (with a double
space).

A CONCLUSION

It is still true that for greater readability extra space after a
sentence is desirable. Nonetheless, there is no practical way to
implement the practice unless you are willing to do a lot of manual
checking of line beginnings and endings. Therefore, life is easier if
you don't do it--at least until some software publisher adds it as an
option in their justification menu.

I therefore declare the dictum in the 1959 GPO Style Manual to be
officially suspended, except where the available technology permits its
application.

HTH,

Dick

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