Hello Team,

I've been asked to explain why it is no longer necessary to put two spaces between sentences. I believe the historical explanation will convince even those of us who still cling to the ways we were taught in high school typing class. It was correct back then, but practices changed when we all started doing our own digital typesetting, and font technology improved in the mid-80s.

Two spaces were once the norm in the early days of the personal computer, when we were still using a limited choice of monospaced fonts, like Courier and Monaco. A monospaced font uses the same amount of space for every character, whether it's a wide m, a thin i, or a small period. Given so much space around a period, and so many other characters in a monospaced font, two spaces helped to visually separate between sentences back then, aiding readability.

Things changed with the advent of more sophisticated font-building software, which gave us proportional fonts to replace the monospaced ones. Proportional fonts adjust the side bearings (the varying amount of space required around each character). In addition, font designers spend a great deal of time adjusting kerning pairs, further tweaking the space between each and every pair of characters that occur, including the space after a period, and before the one space that follows.

So with all the work that goes into spacing our fonts for us, we only need to hit the space bar once after a period. Unless of course you choose to use monospaced Courier, in which case you are probably beyond saving. Seriously though, for those who still want to hit the space bar twice, consider the filter in Adobe Illustrator that corrects this practiceÉ and the fact that they chose to call it Smart Punctuation, and Smart Spaces. There is a similar preference setting in MS Word to automatically remove the second space after a period; they just don't imply any value judgments involving the word smart!