Re: Spaces after full stop

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

Up until the 1970's (the last time I worked with typeset 
documents),
the printing standard was 1.5 spaces following a colon or 
the end
of a sentence, a practice that was referred to as "French 
spacing."
Two spaces was the standard for "French spacing" in 
typewritten
manuscripts that would be set, because it provided a visual 
cue to
the setters that enabled them to work quickly without having 
to
read everything they set (and, of course, because you can't 
lay
down 1.5 spaces with a manual typewriter).

The first electronic typesetting system I worked with 
distinguished
between a "period," which was automatically followed by 1.5 
spaces,
and a "point" (as in decimal point), which was followed by 
no space,
by using separate characters on a customized keyboard.  The 
only
circumstance in which a period/point was followed by exactly 
one
space was initials, and this was achieved by using the 
"point"
character followed by a hard (typed) space.  This was all 
pre-DTP,
of course.

Gene Kim-Eng



----- Original Message ----- 
From: <brianlindgren -at- aol -dot- com>
To: <lt34 -at- csus -dot- edu>; <dossy -at- panoptic -dot- com>; 
<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 12:16 PM
Subject: Re: Spaces after full stop


> Actually, typesetting had the rule of a single space after 
> a period. It was typewriting that had two spaces -- again, 
> because of the monotype issue (Courier font in the case of 
> a typewriter).
>
> Not sure about the rule for old hot type typesetting, but 
> for all electronic typesetting, the rule was to use a 
> single space after punctuation.

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