Sentence spacing
Sentence spacing concerns how spaces are inserted between sentences in typeset text. Until the 20th century, publishing houses and printers in many countries used additional space between sentences. In 2011, the HTML 2. 1 standard added an extra space to preserve additional space on its word on the Web.
About Sentence spacing in brief
Sentence spacing concerns how spaces are inserted between sentences in typeset text and is a matter of typographical convention. Until the 20th century, publishing houses and printers in many countries used additional space between sentences. The desired or correct sentence spacing is often debated but some sources now claim an additional space is not necessary. Some people preferred double sentence spacing because that was how they were taught to type. Technological advances began affecting sentence spacing methods. In 1941, IBM introduced the Executive, a typewriter capable of proportional spacing, which had been used in professional typesetting for hundreds of years. This innovation broke the hold that monospaced font had on the typewriter industry; the innovation did not spread. By the 1960s, electronic photetting systems ignored white runs of white text in text. In the 1980s, publishing software provided the average writer with more advanced tools to adjust the written word on its own. Early typography on the World Wide Web, as HTML 2 1, normally ignores additional spaces, although in 2011 the CSS 2 1 standard officially added an option that can preserve additional spaces on its written word. In 2011, the HTML 2. 1 standard added an extra space to preserve additional space on its word on the Web, although this was not officially added until after the standard had been adopted by all major web browsers. It is not clear which convention is more readable, but the few direct studies conducted since 2002 have produced inconclusive results as to which conventions are more readable.
The standard for em-spaced sentences is 13 or 12 spaces. For most countries, this remained the standard for published work until the20th century. Yet, even in this period, there were publishing houses that used a standard word space between sentence—a technique called French spacing. This standard continued in use, to some extent, into the 1990s. From around 1950, single sentence spacing became standard in books, magazines, and newspapers, and the majority of style guides that use a Latin-derived alphabet as a language base now prescribe or recommend the use of a single space after the concluding punctuation of a sentence. This became known as English spacing, and marked a divergence from French typists, who continued to use French spacing, who used one and a half interword spaces to separate sentences. For example, in the U.S. in the 1940s and in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, English spacing was used to separate two sentences, rather than three. For more information on how to write in English, visit EnglishSpacing.org. In French, the term synonymous with single-space sentence spacing until the late 20th. century, is “French spacing” or “French-spacing” The term French-Spacing is used to refer to the practice of using two spaces between sentences to mimic the style used by traditional typesetters. In English, the word space is usually used to describe the space between two sentences. In France, this is called “French Spacing”
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This page is based on the article Sentence spacing published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
