Spaces and punctuation (Guest:Derek)

Question

How many spaces should there be between a full stop and a new sentence?

Maj · Accepted Answer

It depends on how close you are to the computer screen, the size of the screen... I leave it to my wordprocessor speller.It does wonders. Futhermore, it never fails to work!

Hitchhiker · Answer

Thanks Maj,

Apparently you should punctuate thus:

Hi, I am hitchhiker. This is a test sentence, with some common punctuation; and more!

Leave a single space after punctuation; then continue with your text.

Maj · Answer

Thanks Hitch. You are always so helpful!

Pia · Answer

hey everyone .... i'm just flying by!!! wayyy too busy to participate in the summer, but i'll be back in winter.  i happened to click on this post for some reason and HAVE to answer.  Hitch is right, it IS one space after punctuation - however, after a full stop (or period) it's two spaces.  Like this. See you all in the winter ***

Hitchhiker · Answer

Also see our Students: Commonly faced problems

Guest · Answer

That fullstop rule was for printing, in the 'olden days' It's now not so important.

Humor · Answer

Hi Hitchi

THanks for the English science joke,but I didn't get it for the (.) fullstop joke.HOw did you laugh at it?

Derek come back and explain yourself.

Guest · Answer

Hello,

I learnt many years ago and was taught that after a full stop you should leave two spaces and after a comma leave one space. Some people leave three but I think two is adequate! I don't think it is something that is "written in stone" but is considered the "norm."

Regards.

Jean

Kingdavid · Answer

As a professional DTP person, I originally learnt, when learning to type, to have two spaces after a full stop, one after other punctuation. I then read a publication by Adobe, which explained that in the days of monospaced typewriters it was necessary to have two spaces after a full stop because all the letters were the same width, but in modern proportional fonts and on computers it is better to have just one space, as the DTP and WP programs will make text look just fine with one space after a full stop, as the spacing between letters is automatically determined (kerning) and adjusted so that everything looks proportionally spaced. To have 2 spaces after a full stop gives a very large space which looks out of proportion with the rest of the text.
Thus, there should be only 1 space, unless you are typing on an old typewriter with a monospaced font.
I realised straight away that the publication by Adobe (about typography) was correct and I changed immediately to putting just 1 space after a full stop instead of 2. It's a case of how professional you want things to look. 2 spaces looks amateurish, 1 space looks professional. Just about all professionally produced publications I see now have 1 space after a full stop. This is the publishing norm so should be followed, I believe, in all publications.

Also, Jean made a mistake with the quote marks, in that she wrote "norm." at the end of her sentence. The full stop should go at the end of the sentence, the quote marks should go around the word being quoted, otherwise you are quoting the word norm with a full stop as part of the quote, and the sentence itself has no full stop as such.

Now, back to the number of spaces. It is interesting to note that in very old books, they tended to add as many spaces as they wanted after a full stop. To us today this looks ridiculous, sometimes half a line would be space after a full stop. But back in those days when everything was set manually by hand for the printing presses, they had to put in extra spaces somewhere to justify the text, so they did it after full stops, and I suppose there were times when a line was altered, and so either the extra space was used up or extra space added in to avoid having to reset all lines after that one.

In the modern times, we use HTML for webpages. HTML converts multiple spaces into one single space, allowing for many spaces within the HTML coding to make layout of the coding clearer for HTML programmers, and so if you put 2 spaces into a post here, it gets displayed as 1 space, just as if you put in 20 spaces, it would come out as 1 space.

I also did a quick search on Google and found a few websites that were stating their style guidelines and all said to put just one space after a full stop, not two.

Guest · Answer

I was going to post this fact, but kingdavid already hit it. This is just a highlight so that it is more visible:

HTML converts multiple spaces into one single space, allowing for many spaces within the HTML coding to make layout of the coding clearer for HTML programmers, and so if you put 2 spaces into a post here, it gets displayed as 1 space, just as if you put in 20 spaces, it would come out as 1 space.

If you must have multiple spaces in an HTML page, you should use the non-breaking space, AKA

Thus, typing three s in a webpage will add three intentional spaces.
Just like this. The only problem is this forum doesn't allow the to work, but I guarantee you the rest of the Web will.

Spaces and punctuation (Guest:Derek)

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