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Double spacing at the ends of sentences is a typographical convention that has sometimes been termed English spacing. Since the mid-1990s, it has often been termed French spacing, although that term has traditionally referred to the practice of single spacing. OverviewHistorically, typesetting in all European languages has a long tradition of using spaces of varying widths for the express purpose of enhancing readability. American, English, French, and other European typesetters' style guides—also known as printers' rules—specified spacing rules which were all essentially identical from the 18th century onwards. Following the widespread adoption of the typewriter, French spacing and English spacing were terms describing French-language typists' and English-language typists' differing standardized typewriter approximations with single-width spaces of traditional typesetters' spacing rules:
Context: spacing rulesBackgroundStarting with Gutenberg, European typesetting (continental and British Isles) used a wide range of various width spaces and alternate-width letter and ligature choices in order to enhance readability and appearance and to facilitate justification. Alternate-width letters and ligatures were quickly discarded as requiring too much effort for normal use (but remain best-practice among sophisticated typesetters), but the 15th century attempt to further discard alternate-width spaces was quickly rejected by readers as too difficult for normal reading. Typography then standardized on an essentially common set of spacing rules, using multiple width spaces. Multiple width spaces were for several centuries universally retained even in high-volume commercial printing. Their usage formed traditional typesetting's spacing rules. Traditional English typesetting's spacing rulesOverview: general usage and standard space definitionsDifferent width spaces were used for various specific purposes. In general, as well as separating words and sentences:
Additionally, spaces were (and still are today) varied proportionally in width when justifying lines, originally by hand, later by machine, now usually by software. That is, a justified line containing for example em spaces and en spaces would have both types of spaces lengthened, but their relative proportions would be retained. Examples of traditional double-spacingBritishThe spacing differences between traditional typesetting and modern mass-production commercial printing are easily observed by comparing two different versions of the same book, from the Mabinogion:
The modern version demonstrates late 20th century mass-production commercial practice. The older version demonstrates thin-spaced words but em-spaced sentences—effectively, double-spacing. It also demonstrates spaces around punctuation according to the rules above and equivalent to French typesetting today. American Declaration of IndependenceThe American Declaration of Independence (1776) clearly shows wider spacing after sentences, typically double-width or even wider. It also shows wider spacing after some commas, apparently when separating semantically significant phrases and clauses. French and English spacingOrigin: the typewriterThe introduction of the typewriter allowed ordinary people to create typewritten text without the requirement for professional typesetting equipment or professional typesetters. French spacing rules and English spacing rulesWith the typewriter, French and English typing standards diverged, adopting alternative typewriter approximations of the essentially common typesetting standard.
The once exception English typists made was that a colon or semicolon should be followed and preceded by single spaces. The outcome was that French spacing had single spaces between sentences but a great many additional em spaces between text and punctuation (e.g., spaces precede colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, and question marks, and are inserted between text and enclosing quotation marks), while English spacing had no spaces between text and punctuation but double-spaces (two notionally half-em spaces equals one notional em space) following colons and semicolons and between sentences.[4][5] These approximations were taught and used as the standard typing techniques in French- and English-speaking countries, respectively.[6] For example, T. S. Eliot typed rather than wrote the manuscript for his classic The Waste Land between 1920 and 1922, and used only English spacing throughout: double-spaced sentences.[7] Evolution of typing, typesetting, and French and English spacingInfluence of typewriter approximationsTypesetters continued to follow the original standards, but increasingly started to adopt the typists' approximations as their typesetting style, particularly in America but also in the UK and France.[8] The reasons were predominantly commercial rather than stylistic. A key change in the publishing industry from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century was the enormous growth of mass-produced books and magazines. Increasing commercial pressure to reduce the costs, complexity, and lead-time of printing deeply affected the industry, leading to a widening gap between commercial printing and fine printing.[9] For example, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was originally published by a high-volume commercial printer according to its house rules and it was not until its third publication that Eliot was satisfied with its typesetting.[10] The underlying reasons were:[11]
Where before the First World War virtually all English-language books were printed following standard typesetters' spacing rules, by the end of the Second World War most American books and an increasing proportion of English books were printed following the typewriter's English spacing approximation rules.[12][13][14] By the 1960s it was rare even in England for ordinary English-language books to be printed using standard typesetters' spacing rules. After World War IIAround World War II, with an increase in high-volume low-cost mass-produced printing (e.g., newspapers, pulp-novels, magazines) the practice arose of single-spacing between sentences and after colons and semicolons, to the point of being standard commercial practice in mass-print-runs from the 1950s onwards in America, although the practice was adopted more slowly in other English-speaking countries. The practice moved over time moved into the more expensive works. The English spacing approximation was retained in higher quality (and higher cost) printing. For example, the US government's official style guide mandated its use in 1959 for all government documents regardless of printing method:[15]
By the time of the computer typesetting program TeX's creation, and at least up until 1993,[16] this was still known even in America as English spacing (sometimes: American typewriter spacing). For example, people wishing to produce only single spaces between sentences in TeX need to switch on the French spacing output option. Desktop publishingThe introduction of non-commandline DTP software by the Macintosh in the mid-1980s and its subsequent widespread adoption eliminated the previous cost-restriction that had driven the switch to single-spacing. There was no longer any material marginal cost associated with typesetting double-spaces, or even multiple-width spaces. Despite this, resistance to double-spaced sentences started to grow among English-language professional designers and typographers as they became more directly involved with typesetting. Traditional French typists' rules continued to be the uncontested norm in French-speaking countries,[17] but English spacing became increasingly deprecated in English-speaking countries. Additionally, there has been a designer-led trend towards closer-fitted text in general.[18][19][20] For example, an increasing number of computer font design guidelines now recommend use of quarter-em spaces rather than third-em spaces. With regard to spacing, modern designers are retracing the steps of the 19th century design-led typographer William Morris. Morris rejected the restrictions of commercial typesetting which at the time demanded traditional typesetting's spacing rules, and, declaring a "rage for beauty", advocated close-set type and dark "color" (lack of whitespace, creating uniformity of appearance). But this "rage for beauty" did not not necessarily translate to reader comprehension. The reason Donald Knuth gave for creating the TeX typesetting system was his dismay on receiving the proofs of a new edition of his book The Art of Computer Programming at the unreadability of the then new close-fitted phototypesetting technology, which he described as "awful" due to its "poor spacing".[21][22] The leading style guides of Morris's time documented that readers of the time had the same reaction to Morris's output as Knuth did later to phototypesetting's output. De Vinne, for example, wrote in The Practice of Typography:
And in Modern Book Composition he wrote:
TerminologyBy the mid-1990s, the term French spacing was observed to be occasionally used in America to refer to English spacing. The earliest use of this inversion was apparently 1994 by the University of Chicago Press.[23] By the mid-2000s this usage had been widely asserted on the internet. It is not clear why this reversal occurred.
An American publishing consultant to the legal profession (which uses double-spacing in formal documents in most English-speaking countries) noted in 2007 that French typography conforms to the original meaning of French spacing rather than the revised American meaning:[28] (emphasis added) ReadabilityThe only study on the comparative readability of the spacing conventions has been Colin Wheildon's study Communicating, or just making pretty shapes?,[29], which found empirical support for some design assertions but for others found empirical support for their opposite. Style preferencesGeneral preferencesFour main preferences exist today:
Style guidesFrench style guides continue to specify that sentences should be single-spaced, and that non-breaking spaces should separate text and most punctuation. French-Canadian style guides diverge slightly, still specifying single-spaced sentences but allowing that non-breaking spaces are not needed before question marks, exclamation marks, or semicolons.[39] An exception is the French daily Libération uses French quotation marks without any spaces. Early English-language style guides such as Jacobi in the UK[40][41] and MacKellar, Harpel, Bishop, and De Vinne in the USA[42][43][44][45] specified that sentences should be em-spaced, and that words should be 1/3 em spaced (occasionally 1/2 em). This remained standard for quite some time. For example, MacKellar's The American Printer was the dominant style guide in the US at the time and ran to at least 17 editions between 1866 and 1893, and De Vinne's The Practice of Typography was the undisputed global authority on English-language typesetting style from 1901 until well past Dowding's first formal alternative spacing suggestion in the mid-1950s. Further, both the American and the UK style guides also specified that spaces should be inserted between punctuation and text. (It should be noted in passing that the MacKellar guide described these as hairspaces but itself used a much wider space than was then commonly regarded as a hairspace, apparently matching Jacobi's widely accepted 1890 standardization on the 1/5 em space.[46]) The official USA government style guide of 1959 specifies that sentences should be em-spaced even when typeset, and defines a double-space as a synonym for an em-space:[47]
Recently some widely-used American style guides, notably the Chicago Manual of Style, call for a single space after full stops and colons.[48][49] In chapter 6 Punctuation section 3 Typographic and Aesthetic Considerations, for example, the Chicago Manual of Style states:
The FAQ to the Chicago Manual of Style explicitly states that the "traditional American practice" is to double-space after colons and periods but then states that "This practice is discouraged by the University of Chicago Press".[50] Designers' style preferencesThe reasons offered in support of single spacing are stylistic, reader-centric, and historical. Historical reasoning asserts that single-spacing is the historical norm and that double-spacing is a typewriter-driven anomaly. Examples include the Font Site's declaration of The Rules Of Type, citing Cavanaugh's Digital Type Design Guide:[51] Computer softwareOverviewAs noted in Microsoft's Character Design Standard (5 of 10): Space Characters for Latin 1: "In digital fonts there are only two kinds of space characters supported by most computers, the space and the no-break space." This means that moving to computers has not altered the situation created by the typewriter: if the typist wishes to separate sentences more clearly, or to use the English spacing approximation of the standard typesetters' spacing rules, the lack of multiple-width spaces still requires use of multiple spaces on computers, just as on typewriters. Some computer typesetting technologies discourage the use of double-spacing (e.g., HTML, XML, SGML), whereas others encourage or create it (most notably TeX and LaTeX). Text editorsSome computer text 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 behaviour is configurable (with the option sentence-end-double-space). There are also functions to move the cursor an entire sentence forward or backward which rely on double-spaced sentences. The GNU Coding Standards still recommend using two spaces,[52] to accommodate the default behavior of traditional text editors. The optional Emacs mode LaTeX provides a toggling option French-LaTeX-mode which if set to French automatically inserts additional and correctly-breaking spaces around punctuation, but does not create double-spacing between sentences or after colons or semicolons.[53][54] Web browsersWeb browsers follow the HTML display specification and for programmers' convenience ignore runs of white space when displaying them.[55][56] In order to force a web browser to display multiple spaces, a special character sequence (such as    for an en-space followed by a thin space,   for an em-space, or for two successive spaces) must be used.[57] TeXThe typesetting software TeX by also treats input runs of whitespace as a single space, but uses a heuristic to recognize sentence endings and typesets these by default with double-spaces. Contrary to the relatively recent Americanism, Knuth uses the terms English spacing and American typewriter spacing to describe this: he named the TeX macro to disable the automatic enlarging of space after the end of a sentence \frenchspacing, whereas double-spacing is the default (or can be explicitly enabled with \nonfrenchspacing). Microsoft WordMicrosoft Word similarly uses a heuristic to recognize sentence endings. It does not distinguish between single- and double-space sentence breaks; it will allow the user to enter as many spaces as desired, and it will display or print as many spaces as are entered. The early problem it had with inserting linebreaks between the two spaces of a double-spaced sentence break has been fixed since at least Word 97. Operating systemsMacintosh users cannot choose space length but can enter breaking spaces or non-breaking spaces (option-space) in any program. Microsoft Windows users and most unix users cannot choose space length and are further restricted to only entering breaking spaces unless particular applications provide explicit French spacing support or an ability to enter non-breaking spaces. Postscript fontsMany Type 1 Postscript fonts do not have a non-breaking space in their character set. When the user tries to insert a non-breaking space using these fonts, the OS substitutes the default (breaking, single-width) space. This frequently causes problems for French typists since they make heavy use of the non-breaking space. Character encodingsASCII and similar early character encodings provide only a single space, which is breaking and fixed-width (the particular width specified by each particular output font). EBCDIC, although earlier than ASCII, provided a breaking fixed-width space (SP), a non-breaking fixed-width space (RSP: "Required SPace"), and an alternate-width non-breaking fixed-width space intended for use in numeric lists with fixed-width (but not necessarily em-width) digits (NSP: "Numeric SPace"). HTML and Unicode can both record runs of consecutive spaces, and also explicitly provide the capability to record multiple-width spaces and breaking and non-breaking spaces. HTML provides 4 variations on space width and 1 fixed-width non-breaking space, which are: <space>,  ,  , and   (all breaking); and (non-breaking). Note that <space> will equal   in a typewriter font but will vary according to the font designer's specification in all other fonts, whether proportional or monotype. Note that the HTML standard also specifies Display behaviour, not just character encoding, so web browsers following the HTML standard will collapse multiple <space>s to a single <space>. Non-browser apps which use HTML encoding will not necessarily behave this way at display-time, e.g. later versions of MS Word. Unicode provides 15 variations on space width and breakability, including: THIN SPACE   and NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE  .[58][59][60] Some confusion exists within the Unicode standard of how to apply these under various spacing rules:[61]
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Mercedes Car
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