When I was learning the finer points of publication design back in autumn 1994, Bridget told me not to type “two spaces” after periods.
She had designed a number of items for the therapy practice where she worked, and had read a book called “The Mac is Not a Typewriter” by Robin Williams (not the famous actor). Williams argued that a single space after periods was appropriate in digital design.
We were both college students at the time taking “Publication Design & Graphics” — a course I really enjoyed (even though the instructor — who was teaching the course for the first time — told me I should “try taking the class sometime” since I tended to ask Bridget for advice instead of him).
In the early years of our marketing communications business, Bridget and I produced several monthly print newsletters for clients. The businesses and organizations would typically submit articles as Word docs or plain text files (we’d also get some WordPerfect files during that era).
We’d spend time doing a “find and replace” to eliminate double spaces after periods prior to importing the text files into our layouts in Adobe PageMaker and Adobe InDesign.
During my years in high school, a typing class was something that was encouraged for students. It seemed as if most students took the course in that era. We had it in ninth grade and were actually the first class in the school district to take typing classes on DOS-based computers.
Speaking of typewriters, here is Bridget’s vintage machine. It was kind of nice to be able to pull this baby out of storage for the blog post:
The “two-spaces-after-a-period” method is a relic of the days when typewriters were the common tool used to compose documents. Because of the monospaced/uniform nature of fonts on those machines, you needed to have two spaces after a period to clearly show where a sentence ended.
When Apple’s original Macintosh computer was introduced in 1984, it changed the way the world formatted documents. The bundled fonts were proportional, and you could control things like tracking, leading, and width in text blocks.
Yet to this day, it is still debated as to whether two spaces after a period is better than one.
You can count me firmly in the one-space camp.
It appears one-space advocates have found an ally in Microsoft. The Verge reported on April 24 that Microsoft “has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period as an error, and to offer a correction to one space.”
Microsoft Word makes the suggestion via the Editor on the desktop version of the app. You can ignore the suggestion if you prefer, but I'd recommend you take the advice.
When you are dealing with text in narrow text blocks (ex. publications that have columnar layouts), using one space after a period can make the overall flow better. Two spaces is “overkill” in modern page layout programs.
My personal opinion is that a single space after a period makes publications more attractive and pleasing to the eye.
For example, here are two text blocks I setup in Adobe InDesign 2020 — part of a 4-column layout on a 8.5" x 11" page with the text (11-point Palatino) set to “justified.”
I typically justify the text in the publications we create (it sometimes requires a little more work when setting up styles, but the finished product looks clean and balanced).
In the two blocks below, you can see how adding “two spaces” after periods creates “big” gaps between sentences (if you are viewing on mobile, you can click the picture below to view in full resolution):
Here’s a close up version of the spaces after the first sentence in the sample text blocks. You’ll see how much more appealing a “single space” after the period looks (if you are viewing on mobile, you can click the picture below to view in full resolution):
After nearly a quarter-century doing layout and design for print and digital platforms, removing two spaces after periods (and replacing with a single space) has become a habit. Combined with the finer grammar points outlined in the “AP Stylebook,” it helps you create attractive documents and publications.
It was one of the first lessons I learned when I was studying digital pagination in college. It is a valuable tool to have in your design arsenal.
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