Talk:1285: Third Way
ONE SPACE AFTER A PERIOD. Davidy²²[talk] 04:38, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
Writing plaintext, I always do two spaces after a sentence ending period. This is probably because I did in fact start typing on a real typewriter. In an environment where automatic formatting will take place, like a web page or wiki text, I use the newline. I have had people in this wiki collapse my multiple line forms to one of the others. (I was disappointed.) --Divad27182 (talk) 04:48, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
I prefer double spacing, but I used single spacing in writing the explanation, just to make people happy. Perhaps I should have used new lines. Concomitant (talk) 05:10, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
The 'third way' is a little underappreciated here: it divides the text into self contained logical units, and makes text processing tools (grep, diff etc.) much more usable. Proper text rendering engines (TeX, HTML, etc.) already make this assumption and group sentences accordingly. If only I realized this earlier, it would have made my thesis revisions much more easier. In fact, up to this moment, I thought I was that lone guy in the comic. EDIT: this comment in xkcd forums makes my point clear: http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=106217#p3489055 --141.101.96.11 05:42, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
I always just find and replace double space with single space. If formatting suffers, someone did a bad job.108.162.231.228 06:33, 1 November 2013 (UTC) Synthetica
So, why did double spacing after a period ever exist? It doesn't seem necessary. PheagleAdler (talk) 07:31, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
even though i learned typing on a typewriter, to this day i had never heard of the double space thing. maybe it's a US only thing, like the stupid french with spaces BEFORE punctuation marks. Peter (talk) 07:54, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
As a german typographer I have to say I’m shocked! Two spaces per period? A space before punctuation?! My scientific opinion: you all are completely crazy ;-) (Just kidding, but seriously, two spaces? In Germany, the first possibility to do that safely is your last will …) Quoti (talk) 10:34, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
