Sentence Spacing - Digital Age

Digital Age

Mignon Fogarty, "Grammar Girl", points out that in the past typewriting used two spaces—in deference to its monospaced font limitations—but "Now that most writing is done on computers it is no longer necessary to type two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence". She answers the question of "How many spaces?" as follows: "On a typewriter, use two. On a computer, use one". This position highlights the late 20th-century transition from the typewriter to the computer, and its effect on sentence spacing.

Today, computers and digital fonts allow sentence spacing variations not possible with the typewriter. Proportional fonts are widely available to average computer users. Computer-based tools such as proportional fonts, kerning, computer-based word processors, and software such as TeX allow users to arrange text in a manner previously only available to professional typesetters. The World Wide Web eliminates all repeated spaces because of the characteristics of HTML, although this can be viewed as a limitation of the underlying technology, and as such it doesn't offer the same fine-grained control of spacing as other modern software. Yet, even in the digital age, many school students are still taught to strike the space bar twice between sentences when using computers, contributing to confusion regarding sentence spacing in the 21st century.

The text editing environment in Emacs uses a double space following a period to identify the end of sentences unambiguously; the double space convention prevents confusion with periods within sentences which signify abbreviations. How Emacs recognizes the end of a sentence is controlled by the settings sentence-end-double-space and sentence-end.