Oops
I touched off an accidental firestorm yesterday by prompting Nick to comment (twice, actually) on whether one or two spaces at the end of a sentence is correct.
Unfortunately, I remembered incorrectly and Nick believes in the single space method. Oops. But he misunderstood my conversion to two spaces, so I ought to explain that.
Once upon a time, I used two spaces. Then I met Nick, and he presented a convincing argument for one space, so I switched. About six months ago, I mentioned the issue to Katie, who rebutted Nick’s argument very well and offered a convincing argument in favor of two spaces, so I switched back. I unfortunately don’t remember the details of Katie’s argument, but it certainly didn’t have anything to do with her status as an English grad student (not an English major; she majored in American Studies). I think she did mention various manuals of style, though.
Allan Said,
September 9, 2004 @ 11:32 am
I use two spaces after end punctuation and colons for monospace fonts (Monaco, Courier, et alia) and one space after the same for proportional fonts. I learned two spaces when learning to type on a manual typewriter, but I think I changed over after I read Robin Williams’s _The Macintosh is Not a Typewriter_ or somesuch.
If you’re drafting for further typesetting and future publication (the target audience of style manuals such as Chicago, NYT, APA, MLA), two spaces. If you are publishing directly (DTP, zines, web sites, web logs) use the single space rule if you are using proportional fonts. If you’re writing up a Usenet article, I suggest two spaces, as I think most read those in monospace fonts.
Enough of dating myself.