Re:Writing one sentence per line
by cratermoon on Monday June 20, 2022 @07:19PM
(#31817526)
Take a ruler to some text that's traditionally typeset and you'll notice that the width of the whitespace after a sentence end is slightly wider than the space between words. That's either an em space or an en quad. Between-word spacing would be about 1/2 an en.
Studies examining whether or not wider spacing between sentences improved readability have been inconclusive.
There is one good reason to use two spaces between sentences, at least for text that's going to be processed automatically. It can be very difficult for software to know whether a given punctuation mark is the end of a sentence or something else, like an abbreviation. GNU Emacs, for example, is (or was) coded to recognize sentences by looking for two spaces after a ., ?, or !.[1]
Studies examining whether or not wider spacing between sentences improved readability have been inconclusive.
There is one good reason to use two spaces between sentences, at least for text that's going to be processed automatically. It can be very difficult for software to know whether a given punctuation mark is the end of a sentence or something else, like an abbreviation. GNU Emacs, for example, is (or was) coded to recognize sentences by looking for two spaces after a ., ?, or !.[1]
1 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Se...