technology

I'm a graphic designer, and the first thing I do when I flow copy is find and replace double spaces with single spaces. Other people have already posted why (automatic kerning, monospaced fonts), but it's a vestige of the typewriter era, not best practices for the internet.

There are a lot of horrible type standards on the internet, like not auto-ragging, QWERTY vs. DVORAK keyboards, and horribly inconsistent treatment of ligatures, but relics of the typewriter days are not one of them.

This is built into html itself.

I'm sorry, friend, but this isn't a bug. This is a deliberate feature, common across the web, and it's to improve readability for most people.

This is how I learned to type also, and a person that I worked with on an accessibility documentation project last year finally convinced me to break the habit. As others have said, this convention emerged when all fonts were monospace, and it did indeed improve clarity there. It no longer does on modern systems, and in fact makes it harder for some people to read. It is no longer the standard and is actually actively discouraged for accessibility reasons. It took me about a week to actually break the habit, but it wasn't too bad. I'd advise you to do the same.

The head of legal at my last job used double space after fullstop, which she said was for legibility.   I don't think it really improved legibility.   Rather, it made me mentally pause longer and uncomfortably between sentences, and it looked noticeably unnatural.

Everyone in this thread is wrong. Double space is good practice. Modern typesetting makes it unnecessary? Who cares? The layout engine can just ignore the space and function semantically. If it doesn't, its broken and should be fixed. On the other hand, text editors designed for adults with functions that operate on sentences as a unit use the double space to distinguish between an abbreviation and the end of a sentence. Emacs users are a powerful enemy.

you're not typing on a typewriter, the double space after a period is purely unnecessary and distracting for the reader

This is a feature of web browsers, they will "collapse whitespace"

If this is a bit; hilarious. If its a sincere post, then I'm sorry OP you're a relic of a time that no longer exists. Double spacing is excellent for improving readability on monospaced fonts e.g. from typewriters or in terminal windows.

This is a sentence separated by 2 spaces. As can be seen it clearly de-marks the gap much wider than the gap between characters that occurs in monospace fonts. This helps readability.

This is a sentence separated by 1 space. It is a little harder to see the period space in a monospace due to many characters having a gap between them.

But this isn't a relevant property in modern fonts that have different layout dependent not just on the character width (5 l's take less space than 5 m's; lllll mmmmm) but also the gaps are consistent between characters depending on the preceding and following characters, by allowing overlap in spaces by clever kerning e.g. between the Y and the o of You, note how the o sits under the arms of the Y. This means the gaps between characters on modern fonts are consistent, and the single space is clear to see for legibility. Trying to force widen the gap on a period using double spaces with modern kerning is not better for legibility and can in some instances make it worse for readability and cause other technical issues.

A full stop and a space is perfectly legible and is used most places. I think double spacing like that is for typewriters

By allah you people are dogs!

Double spacing after the period improves readability on all fonts not just monospaced ones! When reading a paragraph of sentences it’s much easier to pick out the markers between them as you scan ahead when those have both the punctuation mark and a different spacing!

There could be some argument made for spacing after sentences the same as between words if our forum were using accursed full justification but we’re left justified.

This is a feature of Markdown, which is what Hexbear uſes to format poſts. What Operating Syſtem are you uſing ? I uſe em quads between ſentences, as is the common practice in older printing, but an en quad and a ſpace alſo works (ſometimes even better than an em quad due to allowing for more expanſion in juſtified lines), as was done on the Linotype machines. For Windows, it’s eaſy to make an A‌utoHotKey ſcript to replace the double ſpace with ſomething more workable, and on Linux, there are various options available.

A period (already a small character) + a space is sufficient to separate sentences.

Also, if there are more than one space together, it's hard to count them. That is, the more spaces you keep together, the harder it gets to know whether you've put the correct number of spaces.

This could be fixed site wide by replacing double spaces in the content sent to a browser with space then something like emsp14, which would force the browsers html rendering engine to not automatically compress the white space.

There’s a real subtlety to the creation and refinement of the attention economy.

This isn't a bug. It's a feature of the way browsers render HTML (and possibly whatever Lemmy is using to render Markdown is automatically stripping extra spaces anyway). It means that you can format Markdown/HTML however you like (e.g. inserting line breaks in the middle of paragraphs that will be rendered as spaces, or indenting HTML to be more readable to you) whilst it's still user-friendly when rendered.

You could use   if you want things to appear double-spaced.

if you're on windows you can cheese it by using the alt-0160 shortcut, it generates a no-break space that's read as a character by html instead of a space, I think in linux it should be ctrl+shift+U->00A0?

anyway once you make one of them or copy it from this comment you can ctrl-c and ctrl-v it for ease of use for the rest of time

For instance: One Space. Two Space.  Three Space.       bazinga                        fuck     shit           lmaooo                                poop

I don't understand your examples at all.

You could edit it to use code style. With the "backwards tick" character or whatever it's called.

Or by adding four spaces at the beginning of a line

Genuine question, are you a native speaker?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8515365/are-there-other-whitespace-codes-like-nbsp-for-half-spaces-em-spaces-en-space#8515417

It’s how markdown works