Claims the two-spacing treasonist Glyph Nosis (I suspect that’s not even his real name!):
The second space after a period gets dropped from display anyway, so the old habit gets overridden automagically AFAICT. (And you can take my second space, when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!)
Good 1-space people may wish to avert their eyes from the following. Mr. Nosis (possibly not his real name) is wrong, wrong, wrong:
TWO SPACES AFTER PERIOD: Wait a second, do the two spaces after a period actually get auto-corrected? Let me see. I don’t think that’s the case, but Glyph says I’m wrong. I guess it’s possible something got changed in the system’s autocorrecting features since last I checked, but I think he’s confused. ONE SPACE AFTER PERIOD: Wait a second, do the two spaces after a period actually get auto-corrected? Let me see. I don’t think that’s the case, but Glyph says I’m wrong. I guess it’s possible something got changed in the system’s autocorrecting features since last I checked, but I think he’s confused.
The dreadful truth will be clear, for those with eyes to see… Even if the system did correct two-spacey sentences to the morally correct one-spacey type, true progressive patriots would still prefer to have their archives polluted as little as possible by two-spacey original drafts. Here’s the email I sent to the League list this morning, leading to this declaration of war by “Glyph” on all that’s right and true in sacred typographical matters:
Just got finished going through a pending post in which the author – who shall remain nameless – put two spaces after every period. That meant I had to go through the piece sentence by sentence to correct it. Once upon a time, I had to break myself of two-spacery, too. When you put two spaces after a period, it tends to suggest that you learned to touch-type in ancient times, using typewriters defaulting to “monospaced” (every letter and punctuation mark no matter how wide using the same amount of space), rather than “proportional” fonts (every letter gets the space it needs). Period+2 was imposed to make the former more readable. Every font we use at OT is proportional (except for a very occasional sample of computer code that will be set off in typewriter-looking, Courier font), and will have been designed with Period+1 in mind.
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) More at: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html
UPDATE:
As to how Mr. Nosis arrived at his notion: Not only does Mr. Nosis prefer to type two spaces rather than one, but – I have no choice here but to reveal the contents of past private communications between us – he retains a suspicious, some might say unnatural, affection for the “Text” editor. It is true that two spaces entered into the Text editor will be corrected into one space upon movement back to the (to be preferred by most Writers) “Visual” editor: Two spaces entered after a period on the Visual side will be retained. The former good and proper correction of misspent space reflects a morally unimpeachable decision in favor of the 1-space rule by WordPress developers, who also, it seems, trust that anyone entering two spaces after a period on the Visual side must have a good reason for doing so – as hard as that might be to imagine! Said developers apparently didn’t anticipate the misleading assertions and notions of spacey scoundrels.
