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( Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say.
#American typewriter font commercial use t shirt Pc
Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule-on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type-that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)
And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong.
#American typewriter font commercial use t shirt manual
In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology-the manual typewriter-invaded the American workplace. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. Every major style guide-including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style-prescribes a single space after a period. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two-spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).Įvery modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. (In editing letters for “Dear Farhad,” my occasional tech-advice column, I’ve removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant I’ve received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. * You’d expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you’d be wrong every third email I get from readers includes the two-space error. Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.Īnd yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.