One space or two after a period?
With military writing, two.
I use two, but some web sites and software assign one.
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My old habits are hard to break. I do 2 on a Windows machine or hand scratching on paper (i.e. roughly 2 in the latter case).
That said, the overwhelming majority of my typing today is on iOS, so it typically shows up as one.
I learned to type in the 80s and was taught two. However, no publication, print or online, will accept that anymore. I can’t get out of the habit (and don’t really want to), so I type with two, and when ready to submit somewhere, take 10 seconds to search and replace. It’s not hard (ctrl H).
Is that an Apple thing? I always used Ctrl F.
Ctrl F searches. Ctrl H is search and replace. Works for MS Office and some other software.
I can do this with pretty much any document, even novel length. Search for two spaces, replace with one.
How long does it take the replace engine to do a whole novel?
Serious question, as I’m wondering how good these programs have gotten. I’ll bet it’s a minute or two, if that.
Literally, maybe 5 seconds.
Actually, I was curious, so I pulled an old document up and tested. Less than one second.
MS Office?
Yep. My test was in Word, but I doubt Excel or others would be any slower.
I took typing in 1973 and was taught that it was two after period, question marks and exclamation points.
I could look it up, but going on memory I think it was due to typesetting for newspapers.
Since everything is now digital it is no longer needed.
Typewriters and non-proportional fonts.
I don’t understand the people trying to repress this practice. At this point it’s just a style difference. Certainly no more important than that.
The author of that article is one such example (“please stop”). Who gives a crap if some people use two spaces?
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I’ll continue to type two spaces after a period. It’s something that I’ve been doing for almost 50 years. In all that time I’ve never had anybody point it out to me. Indeed, somewhere in this response I only used one space and I’ll be nobody has noticed it without having to go back and look. If it bothers someone enough that they must beg me to “please stop”, then they really need to get a hobby.
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As a millennial, I concur. It’s ridiculous nonsense to worry about except for your need of ritual and order
Shows me people have way too much time on their hands, and have not ever suffered real hardship.
Making up goblins to fight.
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In newspapers, it’s partly a space issue. Most magazines and such switched as early as the 1940s. All the style guides now say one space and even MS Word started identifying two as an error a couple of years ago.
I’m told with web sites, it messes with something too, but I don’t recall the details enough to explain.