Tag Archives: history of printing

Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. – Slate Magazine

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Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. – Slate Magazine.

This article deals with a mistake I dealt with in teaching. Students are taught in high school, if not earlier, to put two spaces after a period, a problem when using variable width fonts. Teaching technical writing, I stressed getting rid of the extra spaces, showing students why it is a problem. Their scores on reports were not lowered, however, if they did put two spaces after periods.

In teaching page layout and design, I did penalize scores for the extra spaces and asked for projects to be revised. As the article says, on typewriters, with fixed width fonts, the extra space helps. But fixed width fonts make for amateurish appearance.

Some submissions to The Ghazal Page have two spaces after periods. I ignore those, since browsers parsing HTML ignore the extra space.

As I told my students, contemporary word-processing software allows you to create (almost) professional layouts. Why look like an amateur?

In Praise of Books

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The most recent challenge on The Ghazal Page is concluded, and the results can be read online. There are 16 poems by a dozen poets. The poems explore various historical, technical, and personal aspects of books. As a bibliophile (and the editor), I am very pleased with the results.

The graphic design of this issue is based on photos of an early 17th century book. David Quentin Dauthier owns the book and sent the photographs. Quentin also contributed a page of notes on the photos used in this issue. The background and text colors are derived from the photo of the book's spine, so the images are integrated in more ways than just being placed on the pages. Further, the images show the reader examples of design from one stage of the history of printer.

The next challenge will be issued with the fall 2010 issue, which I expect to publish about September 21.