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Until the early 2000s, the Modern Language Association (MLA) left room for its adherents to single or double sentence space. In 2008, it modified its position on sentence spacing to the following: In an earlier era, writers using a typewriter commonly left two spaces after a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point.
"Adding two spaces after a period is called French spacing. French spacing was quite common in books before the 19th century. Later it became the norm for typewritten copy." [8] "French spacing: The additional inter-word spacing between sentences can be switched off in TeX and LaTeX with the command \frenchspacing" [9]
The majority of style guides now prescribe the use of a single space after terminal punctuation in final written works and publications. [43] A few style guides allow double sentence spacing for draft work, and the Gregg Reference Manual makes room for double and single sentence spacing based on author preferences. [48]
Some plaintext editors, such as Emacs and vi, originally relied on double-spacing to recognize sentence boundaries. By default, Emacs will not break a line at a single space preceded by a period, but this behavior is configurable (with the option sentence-end-double-space). More than one space will be preserved, but no additional space will be ...
Without this being set, collapsing strings of spaces to a single space allow HTML source code to be spaced in a more machine-readable way, at the expense of control over the spacing of the rendered page. [4] Double space (English spacing). It is sometimes claimed that this convention stems from the use of the monospaced font on typewriters. [5]
Some manoevres become automaized. A typical example might be the two spaces after a period-sign for US typewriters, or the space-before-{colon, exclamation mark, question mark} typical for French typists. Another example, relevant for me, is the process of inserting a carriage-return in a paragraph.
There have been a number of practices relating to the spacing after a full stop. Some examples are listed below: One word space ("French spacing"). This is the current convention in most countries that use the ISO basic Latin alphabet for published and final written work, as well as digital media. [48] [49] Two word spaces ("English spacing").
Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear the same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Wikipedia's software, automatically collapse double spaces to ...