Today’s Red Meat Friday is about the “correct” number of spaces after a sentence. Irreal has written about this before, most recently here, but all of you were familiar with the controversy long before Irreal opined on the matter. Oddly, the question still has stubborn partisans who will jump into any discussion of the matter to hotly defend their chosen position.
Here’s the latest fusillade, this time from Barton Swaim who reminds older folks that it’s 2021, we don’t use typewriters anymore, and there’s no need for two spaces after a sentence. Lifehacker doubles down on this and says that putting two spaces after a sentence marks you as a geezer.
It’s very true—at least according to the experts—that with modern proportional fonts, one space is the correct answer but it’s also true that it doesn’t really matter because your typesetter or rendering engine is going to use one space no matter what you input. Two-space partisans point out that given your input might very well use a monospace font and that your output will be correct however many spaces you use, two spaces make sense because they make your input easier to read and easier for a script to parse out sentences.
Of course, none of this will change anyone’s mind; that’s why this is a Red Meat Friday item.