Dumb post to the Stargardts Facebook group

[Janina Sajka]

The convention of putting two spaces following the period which
concludes a sentence is a hold over from the days of typewriters. Of a
necessity these were unable to adjust the spacing of chars. Everything
was monowidth, i.e. a 'w' and an 'i' took the same amount of space left
to right.

The console is still like that I think. Actually, I'm not 100% certain,
because I can't see it, but what else does 64 rows by 175 columns (my
current screen size) mean?

With the advent of GUI, we've been able to adopt fonts and typographic
conventions that can adjust chars on screen and on paper printouts. The
'i' no longer need occupy the same space left to right as the 'w.'
Therefore, it's no longer the convention to end a sentence with two
space chars. 

Janina

Albert Sten-Clanton writes:
> Greg, I learned to put two spaces after a period ending a sentence when I
> learned to type.  I don't know if conventions have changed, but that's why I
> do it.  
> 
> Al 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Speakup [mailto:speakup-bounces at linux-speakup.org] On Behalf Of
> Gregory Nowak
> Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2013 7:20 PM
> To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
> Subject: Re: Dumb post to the Stargardts Facebook group
> 
> On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 07:08:39AM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
> > I always proofread everything before I post, so hopefully my posts are 
> > reasonably free of errors.  Most people don't.  It's amazing how many 
> > mistakes you can catch with 30 seconds of proofreading.
> 
> I think a part of this for blind and sighted alike is laziness. I know a few
> people who are just content to type what they have to say, and just hit
> send, because they don't feel like reading through what they wrote. These
> are people who are sighted and blind. I'm not assuming here either. When I
> mentioned this to them, this is what they told me, they don't feel like
> reading through casual writing. Unfortunately, I've looked through their
> professional writing too, and they are invariably surprised by the amount of
> errors I point out to them in such pieces of writing.
> 
> On another note, I noticed a number of blind people, including yourself
> putting two spaces in between every sentence. I put in just one, because
> this is how I learned it in braille, and it just stuck. Is there some sort
> of significance to the two spaces thing, or is it just personal preference?
> 
> Greg
> 
> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/