Spacing After a Full Stop
In typewritten texts and other documents printed in fixed-width fonts, there is a convention among
lay writers that two spaces are placed after the full stop (along with the other sentence enders:
question mark and
exclamation mark), as opposed to the single space used after other punctuation symbols. This is
sometimes termed "French spacing".
In modern American English typographical usage, debate has arisen around the proper number of trailing
spaces after a full stop to separate sentences within a paragraph. Whereas two spaces are still regarded
by many outside the publishing industry to be the better usage for monospace typefaces, the awkwardness
that most keyboards and word-processing software have in representing correctly the 1.5 spaces that
had previously become standard for typographically proportional (non-monospace) fonts has led to
some confusion about how to render the space between sentences using only word-processing tools.
Many descriptivists (i.e. people who describe how language is used in practice) support the notion
that a single space after a full stop should be considered standard because it has been the norm in
mainstream publishing for many decades. Many prescriptivists (i.e. people who make recommendations
for rules of language use), meanwhile, adhere to the earlier use of two spaces on typewriters to
make the separation of sentences more salient than separation of elements within sentences.
Some, however, accept that in modern word-processing the single space is better because two spaces
may stretch inordinately when full justification is applied. Additionally, many computer typefaces
are designed proportionately to alleviate the need for the double space. Most modern typesetters,
designers, and desktop publishers use only one space after a period as do all mainstream publishers
of books and journals.
With the advent of standardized HTML for rendering web pages, the broader distinction between full stop
spacing and internal spacing in a sentence has become largely moot on the World Wide Web. Standardized
HTML treats additional whitespace after the first space as immaterial, and ignores it when rendering
the page. A common workaround for this is the use of (Non-breaking space) to
represent extra spaces, and is done automatically by some WYSIWYG editors.
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