Quote:
Originally Posted by James_Wilde
I learned to type on a typewriter, and learned that one puts two spaces after a full stop (period for the US) and after a colon. I still use this - it's ingrained - and I get a lot of stick from my son, who had grown up in the computer age, and maintains that these extra spaces can cause problems - what problems he didn't say.
So, how many people still put two spaces after a full stop and colon? (Question marks, exclamation marks etc count as full stops for this purpose of course.)
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There were a number of kluges used on typewriters that should be avoided today, including the double-space after a period (double stop) or similar. Typewriters were, with the exception of a few rare typesetting variants, monospaced. With monospaced text the double-space makes sense. With modern typing systems (read: electronic) text is proportionally spaced and the double-space at the end of a sentence should be avoided.
The other kluge from the ancient typewriter days that is still too often seen is underlining text that should be in italics. Again, this was done on typewriters to work around their lack of italics and should never be used on systems that have italics.