I, too, find it of immense interest. I recall being taught that
paragraphs were indented 5 spaces. I also remember that this was not
universal, as there was another variation, called "block style" which was
not indented at all.
I have been looking at a number of books, and noticed that some have a
single space between sentences, others two spaces. This occurrs in both
US and UK editions. I even noticed a German grammar in blackletter that
uses the double spaces, although it was US printed. I do notice, though,
that the double spacing enhances the readability of the text.
On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Hans Franke wrote:
> > On Jan 4, 18:33, Hans Franke wrote:
> > > > When I was in the 8th grade, one of the courses we were required
> > > > to take was in typing. I've never gotten particularly good at
> > > > it, but I did learn that a period at the end of a sentence is
> > > > followed by two spaces, for example.
> > > Thank you very much. So it seams there is a 'school' forcing this in
> > > the US .... and I always wondered why some people add two spaces after
> > > a period.
>
> > It's a recognised standard in English.
>
> Well, from some other messages I got the idea that there are still
> some more differences between Englisch and US typing rules.
>
> > The idea is to make sentence spaces larger than word spaces.
> > Curiously, it's not common in the printing profession, and not at
> > all in other languages.
>
> Well, Bear Stricklins Mail (Danke) added quite some flesh to this.
>
> > I imagine Hans was taught that it's "wrong", since I imagine
> > he learned to type in German.
>
> I was well aware about special (manual) handling for spaces on
> old typesetting machinerie, but never bridged the gap to typewriter
> usage. And no, I've never been told it's wrong - the question
> simply never came up at all. At least for every day typing (yes,
> I did take two years a typin' class at school, but all wat's left
> is the proper use of the space key :) there was only two trules
> about spaces (AFAIR): Three (or one, sinplified) at the beginning
> of a new paragraph, and one after each punktuation (and none before).
> We been told about some odd formats for accounting, but I realy don't
> remember.
>
> As for myself, at some point I startet to insert a space before
> all exklamation and question marks to make them better visibly,
> but that's against any 'common' style.
>
> Gruss
> H.
>
> P.S.: In my opinion this facts are _very_ on topic, because it
> touches a lot of the heritage computing took from typesetting
> and typewriteing.
>
> --
> VCF Europa 3.0 am 27./28. April 2002 in Muenchen
> http://www.vcfe.org/
>
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
Shady Lea, Rhode Island
"Casta est quam nemo rogavit."
- Ovid
Received on Mon Jan 07 2002 - 08:30:02 GMT