One space, not two

I found this article over on Damian Thompson's blog. It explains why one space after a full stop (or period as our American cousins like to call it) is the right way, rather than two.

Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about spaces. "Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong," Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. "When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay," she told me. "I talk about 'type crimes' often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It's a pure sign of amateur typography." "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow."

I mention it because I am a pedant. I can't help it. I have an OCD about ensuring all vowels are present in relevant words (twitter being an exception), that commas are not used excessively and that only one space is used after a full stop. That's right, one. I'm not perfect, I admit, but I try my damned best to be.