Sent by Arlen Walker on 17 October 2006 15:03
On Oct 13, 2006, at 4:40 PM, Austin, Darrel wrote:
>> Is there a way in CSS to turn a single space after a
>> period into a double space - without using (the no
>> break HTML code)? The drawback to using , besides
>> having to type it in, is that if a sentence in the middle of
>> a paragraph starts on a new line, that line is indented by a
>> space, which throws off the look of the whole paragraph.
>
> With CSS? No. And while you could do it server side or via javascript,
> you'd still run into the issue you mention where you could get the odd
> indent.
>
> FYI, you shouldn't be doing this anyway. Most agree that it's not
> proper
> typography (though there's a few hold-outs...namely High School
> English
> teachers...)
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_spacing
Anything I read in wikipedia is, by definition, suspect. So instead I
decided to get out my tools and do some research. I selected some
books and magazines from my library and measured. The books came from
several fields, including but not limited to web design, theology,
woodworking, and writing, and all from different publishers, just to
be sure that the preference of one field or publisher wouldn't skew
the data.
In most of the books, there was very little detectable difference
between the space after a period and the space between words on the
same line (I add that qualifier, because most of the typography in
the books was justified, hence the spacing would vary from line to
line). The interesting variable here is that the writing book (and
The Writer magazine, which I also tested) had a slightly larger space
after the sentence, though nothing as large as twice the space
between words.
The data tends to indicate a preference for single spacing exists
among publishers, people who should be aware of readability issues.
John Rhodes (ACM SIGCHI [Special Interest Group for Computer - Human
Interaction]) wrote there was no empirical evidence that either
method was better than the other (people tended to skip over spaces,
regardless of length). Meaning neither side of this position gets to
play the "improves readability" card.
So the question boils down to one of aesthetics. Personally, I
dislike the extra space. My eye tends to get lost when it encounters
the extra space, and it annoys me when I encounter it. But I freely
admit this is simply anecdotal, and other people may have other
reactions. So the choice of one or two spaces is personal taste.
Now, how to accomplish it? It's possible, through regular
expressions, to add " " as content after every period in a
paragraph. But that brings us to some interesting problems, which
will exist in any sort of automated approach. I think the problems
make it impractical, so I don't include a sample expression because
of that. To do it properly requires the ability to understand what a
sentence is, or at least recognize one when seen, which most web
editing software cannot do reliably.
The first obvious problem is what about sentences that don't, in
fact, end in a period? (The previous sentence is a great example, but
there are more insidious ones.) I suppose you could do the same for
all punctuation marks that end a sentence, but even then you're not
finished.
I can hear someone in the back of the room asking "what about
sentences that end with quotation marks?" (Note how smoothly I worked
that example in.) Quotation marks are supposed to come after the
punctuation, but often they reside inside a sentence, so they will
cause problems for any automated insertion. (As any alert reader may
have already noticed, parentheses also fit this category, as you'd
want to add the two spaces after the closing paren, not between it
and the period.)
I think there are enough exceptions (abbreviations create periods
that don't end sentences, to name another) to cause insurmountable
problems for any automated insertion; probably the best method is to
type the two spaces, then before finishing, do a global search and
replace for double spaces into an entity or combination of entities.
(I'd probably start with the numeric entity 8195, the emspace.)
This thread also contained an unfortunate comment dismissing the
problem a screen reader had with the nbsp entity as just a bug in the
screen reader, therefore not the designer's problem. I wonder if the
commenter takes the same attitude to browser bugs. "So what if IE/
Firefox/Safari can't display this properly. That's a bug in the
browser so It's not my problem!"
Some have brought up style guides as authorities. I suspect you can
pile up the references to an equal depth on both sides. MLA and
Chicago both officially say one space after a period. (I mention this
only because one commenter claimed Chicago says two spaces, so I'll
adduce the URL: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/
OneSpaceorTwo/OneSpaceorTwo02.html) Chicago also says some people
prefer two over one, which I take to mean Chicago considers two
spaces acceptable even though it officially recommends one space. Not
good enough, I fear, to rule either one out of bounds.
Personally, I wouldn't do it; the return on the time investment it
requires isn't sufficient for me. (Incidentally, I'd feel the same
about the reverse case; if the browser somehow inserted two spaces
after the end of every sentence I wouldn't consider it worth the
effort to manually reduce it to one every time it occurred.) But if
you're really wanting to do it, I don't think there's any automated
way to accomplish it.
Have Fun,
Arlen
------------------------------
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