It seems the people that matter agree, only one space after a period.
...Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. 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 e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error...
I was taught two spaces in my typing class in, let me see, 1964? I even typed my own Ph.D. thesis on an Apple II computer, using two spaces after each and every period (enforced by the mean old ladies in the grad school office who also checked every page for 1 inch minimum margins). I've been vaguely aware that many people used only a single space, but I just figured they were, well, wrong. It's utterly reflex by now; I had to go remove them from the text above already. So why was I taught two spaces?
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. 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). 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. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (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. It diminishes it.
OK, I can take a hint. But can an old dog learn new tricks?
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