The practice in those days was hardly universal, though, and many contemporaneous anglophone volumes - John Baskerville’s 1763 Bible, for example - show the spacing that we now regard as the norm that is, a single word space between sentences. Declaration of Independence does likewise. Disruptive by modern standards, they were all the rage when this was originally set, back in 1774. It also uses ems after sentences.Īpart from the funny ss used to set this letterpress page, the thing that catches the eye most are the holes created by the big spaces between sentences. The oldest type sample I have on hand is a replica of an American short story set in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1774. That book, though - a Dutch theological bibliography - uses em spaces (which are more or less equivalent to two word spaces) after periods. I am not a type historian, nor am I an antiquarian book collector, so the oldest printed book I own dates only to 1819. The first patents for related gizmos appeared about 50 years earlier. The first commercially available typewriters - the only ones that could arguably have been influential enough to change typographic habits - didn’t appear until the 1860s. More on that later.īut the use of double spaces (or other exaggerated spacing) after a period is a typographic convention with roots that far predate the typewriter. It’s a fact that people who first learned typing on a typewriter were indeed taught that you should always use two spaces after a sentence-ending period.
![double spacing in onenote apple double spacing in onenote apple](https://help.apple.com/assets/609C618CA267BE60B64DC908/609C618FA267BE60B64DC932/en_US/d8c3435a86700686bf2497fa48006051.png)
Traditional wisdom on the subject asserts that using two word spaces after sentences is left over from the days of the typewriter. I’m going to try to put an end to the argument here. It’s the debate that refuses to die: Do you set one word space or two after a period? In all my years of writing about type, it’s still the question I hear most often, and a search of the web will find threads galore on the subject.