: Re: Should you use two spaces after a period, or just a single one? I had heard some debate on this topic, and I had always learned to use two spaces after a period. But it would seem there

@Samaraweera193

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As Yossi Farjoun pointed out on the english.stackexchange incarnation of this question, part of the controversy here comes from a false dichotomy.  There are really two separate questions involved: one of aesthetics, one of implementation.

Should text be set with a wider space between sentences?  (‘Wider’ doesn’t have to mean ‘exactly double’, of course.)
Should you, when typing, type two spaces at the end of a sentence?

The answer to 1 is debatable: it’s a matter of taste and convention, and varies between publications, between genres, between countries, between languages, and over time.  The current consensus in English, in most genres, is no.  However, there are significant exceptions: Donald Knuth favoured wider inter-sentence spacing, so in communities (eg mathematics, academic CS) where TeX, LaTeX etc. are popular, readers are generally accustomed to it.

The answer to 2 then depends on how your text will be transmitted to the reader.  As html?  Then typing a double space will do nothing: if you really want a wider space, you’ll have to throw in a  .  Via (La)TeX?  If you like wide spacing, do nothing — so does TeX.  If you don’t like that, you’ll have to say so in your document options.  This question has as many answers as there are word processors, markup languages, etc. out there; but this is now a matter of practicality, not of convention or aesthetics.

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