Full Stop, Space, Space…
Posted on | April 2, 2007 | 4 Comments
No no no no no no NO. Alright?
Just NO!
Some things you just don’t do. Not because you were told so when you were a kid, not because of an inherent moral high-ground. But simply because they are wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Now in spite of all the cries of ‘but that’s what my IT teacher told me to do’; Double spaces after a full stop – big no-no. BIG, big, no-no. It’s just wrong. Don’t do it. Unless you are using a typewriter or a monospaced font (like Courier).
French Spacing as it’s known, is the practice of using two spaces after a full stop and colon. This is usually expanded by the morons that use it to encompass double spaces after semicolons, exclamation and question marks. Traditionally French Spacing also includes a single space before the question and exclamation marks. The reasons for this are long and boring but come down to monospaced fonts. Times New Roman isn’t a monospaced font; Arial isn’t a monospaced font. So don’t use French Spacing – it’s outdated and unnecessary. And for those of us that deal with incredibly badly formatted Word™ documents every day it’s just one more annoyance that we have to fix every time.
(I won’t even start on the fact that 99% of you don’t use Word™ properly. Hint: learn about page breaks, learn about proper document formatting; including tabs. Learn to use the program!)
Modern proportional fonts will give you all the space you need after a full stop. You don’t need the extra space – all it does is look ugly and screw up any attempt at properly justifying the text and negates all the hard work the font designer put in with his kerning, leading and tracking values.
So please, lets not do it anymore. It’s wrong, it’s ugly and it takes more time to both type and fix. Just stop it.
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4 Responses to “Full Stop, Space, Space…”
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April 2nd, 2007 @ 9:38 pm
Mr Martin, you sir, are the most massive geek who has ever lived.
And I salute you for it.
November 6th, 2007 @ 3:54 pm
In all seriousness why would you want to waste your time typing an unjustified “rant” on something as petty as this.
November 6th, 2007 @ 8:18 pm
Mainly because it’s not unjustified I guess?
I deal with reformatting the unwashed masses’ attempts at word documents day in and day out. I’d quite easily say that around 20% of my day is ‘fixing’ their formatting problems. That’s technically 7 and a half hours a week my employers are wasting because people think it’s petty and ‘if it looks nice it’ll do’. Add that up to a year’s time and see how much money is being wasted. Hence; I feel it’s quite justified
Thanks for the comment!
November 14th, 2007 @ 1:31 am
I agree! Only those who have been working in the type fields would be able to understand how ‘petty’ this isn’t.