6 Nov
2020
6 Nov
'20
10:22 p.m.
Exactly -- just re-read Will's question. 2 spaces after punctuation is a
fix-size typeface solution to the 1.5 typographer layout.
I was referring to why typed papers were traditionally double spaced
between the lines.
On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 11:02 AM Chris Torek <torek(a)elf.torek.net> wrote:
I use single
spaces between sentences, but my ancestors
used 2... who knows why? :).
Typewriters.
In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of-
sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. Note that this is
all in the variable-pitch font world.
Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the
1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2.
Chris