[Dragaera] Typesetting punctuation - 2 spaces or one?

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Rick Castello wrote:
> On Sun, January 20, 2008 9:41 am, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>
>   
>>>>> Diana wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>>>> A very minor note, again regarding spacing: double spaces after
>>>>>> periods (or other forms of punctuation) are unnecessary unless one is
>>>>>> using a typewriter font (which I sincerely hope the final product will
>>>>>> not be).
>>>>>>             
>
>      I don't work in the business, and had made only note of a change in this
>      regard in subtle passing - when did this happen, and why?
>
>      I'm curious.
>   

Arguably it never happened.

Let me go back a bit.

Originally, typesetting conventions, involving letter widths and 
punctuation placement and so forth, evolved rather organically from 
scribe's conventions for writing by hand.  Printing regularized these 
conventions a lot, because of the vastly larger number of copies of 
things floating around.  Also literacy was on the increase, and having 
the conventions (especially spelling) more stable benefited those for 
whom letters were one minor skill rather than their entire profession. 
It's pretty universally accepted that spacing after a period in a 
typeset document is *NOT* automatically two en-spaces.  (Exactly what it 
is is a question of book design really, though the book designer may 
leave it to the font designer; whichever path is taken, the space 
resulting is nearly always considerably smaller than two en-spaces.)

Then the typewriter came along.  The typewriter was very limited; all 
characters were exactly the same width, including that poor litter dot 
known as the "period".  It was, however, both far faster (with only 
moderate training) and far more legible than handwriting, so it very 
quickly took over the professional production of original text.  (Samuel 
Clemens was almost certainly the first author to submit a typewritten 
manuscript to a publisher.)

Books, however, were still typeset in proportional fonts (and that seems 
likely to remain true; fixed-width fonts were a technological limitation 
of typewriters, not a "feature").   So conventions had to be invented 
for producing the correct results when the manuscript went to the 
typesetters.  In manuscript form (typewritten), the punctuation ending a 
sentence must be followed by two spaces. Those conventions are now well 
over 100 years old, and are pretty firmly embedded into all aspects of 
the industry. 

Recently (last couple of decades), authors have started writing on 
computers.  Even more recently, it has sometimes been possible for 
authors to submit a manuscript by email.  In fiction publishing, at 
least the bits I'm familiar with, a paper manuscript is *also* required, 
however; sometimes perhaps the editor is willing to print it at their 
end, but the workflow for revisions, line edit, poor-freeding, and the 
process of book design and markup are all dependent on the paper 
manuscript.

We are really only now first living in an era when typeset documents are 
directly produced by enough individuals for questions of proper form to 
come up.  At the same time, professionals in the field are still dealing 
with the old manuscript form for most of their work.   To complicate 
things even more, sometimes authors want to print both standard 
manuscript form pages, and "reading copy" pages (formatted for 
convenient reading by people who will NOT be making extensive markup on 
the pages), from the same files.  Worse, they want to do it in Word (it 
was quite easy in Borland Sprint, or even Ami Pro).  

People used to typing on typewriters tend to pretty automatically hit 
two spaces after a period, so lots of WP files have that in them, even 
if they're using a proportional font where it's not really appropriate.

So now suddenly people are talking about these questions again; often 
from unexpected directions, even.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
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