At my last job, a bunch of the older folks did not realize they had a "two spaces" habit.
It's a clear tell.
Saw this meme and thought I'd point that out.
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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It's about the typeface. Back in the day of manual or electric typewriters, we had monospace fonts, meaning that every character had the same width. A lowercase "i" got the same horizontal width as an uppercase "M".
Now we have word processors and proportional fonts, and the spacing after a period is built into the typeface.
One space after a period is correct, unless you are using Courier (or similar).
Exactly. If you're using a typewriter, go ahead and hit space twice. If you're using a computer with variable width fonts that does the typesetting for you, then don't.
Of every single comment in this thread, yours is the one actually addressing the most important factor that influenced this custom. This was imposed by schools who only had typewriters. Newspaper and publishing didn't even think about this because on printing plates they had kerning to worry about when setting each letter.
Same with the 1 and a half or double space between lines. Most people never consider to think that it was taught that way so teachers had space to write notes on your papers. Books and magazines don't need that much space and it actually looks ugly and makes reading harder. Outside of schools, typography is wildly more diverse and adaptable than the narrow habits taught to the amateur touchtypist.