Sentence spacing.

  • Ever since I learned this in high school, I’ve been using two spaces after a period. I’ve noticed recently, however, that a lot of blogs and news sources use a single space to separate each sentences, and I’m wondering if I should be doing the same. My hunch is that this is a journalistic convention, presumbly for newspaper formatting purposes. Does anyone know the answer?

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  • The problem is browsers compress whitespace, so even though you put the proper two spaces in after a period, it is not displayed properly. I supposed someone could whip up a plugin that replaces a period-space-space with period-mspace or period-nbsp-space.

    thats already been done, though i have no clue where the plugin lives — I just know its been done ??

    I just wrote a quick plugin to do this, unfortunately, the rich editor removes duplicate whitespace so the plugin doesn’t work looking for “. “. However, if you don’t use the rich editor, you can grab the very simple but experimental plugin at https://vamos-wentworth.org/downloads/fullstop.zip

    like i said, ??

    https://www.200found.com/archives/2005/03/16/double-space-it/

    Thread Starter shiznaught

    (@shiznaught)

    Thanks for the input. So are you saying that that the single space is a browser idiosyncracy? Maybe this is a browser discrepancy with Explorer and Firefox.

    “So are you saying that that the single space is a browser idiosyncracy?“

    No. It’s basic to HTML, which generally ignores multiple ‘white’ space characters. So whether one space or one hundred, the browser translates it into a single space, based strictly on the HTML specification.

    Ways around this are to place text in a <pre> element, or make use one of a number of HTML character entities (such as &nbsp;).

    The plugin suggested by whoami is almost identical to the second revision of my plugin. Yesterday I had discovered that IE didn’t play well with the emspace, so I had switched to nbsp+space combination.

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