The Double Space Peeve

OK, bear with me here as I have to vent.

I’ve got very few peeves but this one is BIG.

Somehow, someday, people in IT started to use double space character sequence to separate sentences.

No, I’m not talking about man pages. I’m talking messengers, e-mails, documents like reports, etc.

I don’t know how or when this started but, clearly, far too many people do it without giving much thought to it.

The short of it is, the double space style originated in the typewriter era. The spacing between words and characters wasn’t exactly ideal and so the double space trick was born out of necessity as a quick and easy hack to improve readability of typed text on paper.

You had no control over the font properties whatsoever. You got a typewriter and whatever «font» was installed (literally molded on metal) was all you had.

Similarly, in the computing era early terminals had very small screens and very limited variety of fonts that also happened to be all monospaced. Similar problem. For example, man pages, again, had to rely on the double-space trick to make it easier to visually discern one sentence from another.

That said, however, modern terminal emulators (your Terminal app in macOS or similar programs) are capable of displaying all kinds of fonts, including crazy, artsy types and allow you to control font properties. Also, various fonts have different in-built kerning and tracking properties by design which helps to address this problem. Assuming you’re REALLY having one.

Now, the solution to this very old problem today is to pick the right font and adjust its properties to achieve the desired overall look of your document.

It makes no sense to use double space after a full stop.

One other big reason, especially when it comes to messengers and e-mail, is that whatever font you’re using is likely not what the recipient of your messages is seeing.

Your double-spacing zealotry may not just look as sensible on the other end of the wire.

So, please, stop.

Drop by a bookstore and see what the traditional printing industry is doing.

Understand that double-spacing is a special-purpose style that is used either as an absolute necessity (e.g. dumb tty emulators with limited capabilities), a tradition (think man pages) or in highly specialized professional work settings (e.g. by editors in publishing business).

Your e-mail, a Slack message or, especially, a client-consumable text document like a report or a proposal is not where you use a double space.