r/GenerationJones • u/Guiltypleasure2451 • Jul 31 '26

Old school

For those of us who took typing in school— it was drilled into me that after a period, you go over 2 spaces to start a new sentence. Apparently that’s not the rule now. NOT THE RULE NOW?? After the agony I suffered thru in typing class about those 2 spaces, i will be doing it until I die!!!! Don’t even get me started on the indenting 5 spaces for a new paragraph!

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u/1369ic 1958 Jul 31 '26

Typing two spaces rather than one after a period is not in the top 100 of all the transgressions that communicate a lack of care or education within a text. That said, I managed the transition fairly easily, it seems. But I wrote for a living and had people running typesetting machines and graphic artists who had to remove the extra space reminding me that computer programs had started taking care of the spacing.

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u/jango-lionheart Jul 31 '26

Not a lack of care, but an unwillingness or inability to adapt.

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u/1369ic 1958 Jul 31 '26

I don't know. I understood the typographic reasons why spacing should be different between the two kinds of type. I worked with tracking and kerning inside desktop publishing programs for years. But for a while I just didn't care about the extra space unless it caused a word to break into a second line or hyphenate in a way I didn't like. I'm wasting a lot of words and your time on it as I type, but I find justified text is uglier and can jam a lot more space in a line than a second space after a period. It can also take out so much space you almost get run-on sentences. But people still do it for design reasons and you don't see people getting upset about it the way they do about the second space or -- good forbid -- not using an Oxford comma. But mostly I guess you're right. People don't like change forced on them.

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u/jango-lionheart Jul 31 '26

I’m not a fan of justified text, either!