History of sentence spacing

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The history of sentence spacing is the evolution of sentence spacing conventions from the introduction of movable type in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg to the present day.

Contents

An example of early sentence spacing with an em-quad between sentences (1909) German text example - Em sentence spaced - 1907.jpg
An example of early sentence spacing with an em-quad between sentences (1909)

Typesetting in all European languages enjoys a long tradition of using spaces of varying widths for the express purpose of enhancing readability. American, English, French, and other European typesetters' style guides—also known as printers' rules—specified spacing rules which were all essentially identical from the 18th century onwards. Early English language guides by Jacobi in the UK [1] and MacKellar, Harpel, Bishop, and De Vinne in the US [2] specified that sentences would be separated by more space than that of a normal word space. Spaces between sentences were to be em-spaced, and words would normally be 1/3 em-spaced, or occasionally 1/2 em-spaced (see the illustration to the right). This remained standard for quite some time.

MacKellar's The American Printer was the dominant language style guide in the US at the time and ran to at least 17 editions between 1866 and 1893, and De Vinne's The Practice of Typography was the undisputed global authority on English-language typesetting style from 1901 until well past Dowding's first formal alternative spacing suggestion in the mid-1950s[ citation needed ]. Both the American and the UK style guides also specified that spaces should be inserted between punctuation and text. The MacKellar guide described these as hair spaces but itself used a much wider space than was then commonly regarded as a hair space. [2] Spaces following words or punctuation were subject to line breaks, and spaces between words and closely associated punctuation were non-breaking. Additionally, spaces were (and still are today) varied proportionally in width when justifying lines, originally by hand, later by machine, now usually by software.

The spacing differences between traditional typesetting and modern conventional printing standards are easily observed by comparing two different versions of the same book, from the Mabinogion:

  1. 1894: the Badger-in-the-bag game—traditional typesetting spacing rules: a single enlarged em-space between sentences
  2. 1999: the Badger-in-the-bag game—modern mass-production commercial printing: a single word space between sentences

The 1999 example demonstrates the current convention for published work. The 1894 version demonstrates thin-spaced words but em-spaced sentences. It also demonstrates spaces around punctuation according to the rules above and equivalent to French typesetting today.

French and English spacing

French-spaced typeset text (1874) Example of french-spaced text (1874).jpg
French-spaced typeset text (1874)

With the advent of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century, typists adopted approximations of standard spacing practices to fit the limitations of the typewriter itself. French typists used a single space between sentences, consistent with the typeset French spacing technique, whereas English typists used a double space.

These approximations were taught and used as the standard typing techniques in French and English-speaking countries. [5] For example, T. S. Eliot typed rather than wrote the manuscript for his classic The Waste Land between 1920 and 1922, and used only English spacing throughout: double-spaced sentences. [6]

There is, however, considerable variability in the use of the terms, to the extent that they are often used with the meanings reversed. Here are some definitions of French spacing:

This 1960 quotation is the result of some contemporary research:

French spacing is tight spacing with equal word spacing throughout a line, i.e., no extra space after a period, colon, etc. The purpose is not only to create a tighter looking, evenly colored page, but more important, to avoid rivers. In some ad shops, French spacing is understood to mean optically equal word spacing. As to the "French" part of the term, this style has nothing to do with France as verified by several French cultural societies and printers. The word was evidently used because anything "French" was considered to be du haut style. [14]

Movement to single sentence spacing

A key change in the publishing industry from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century was the enormous growth of mass-produced books and magazines. Increasing commercial pressure to reduce the costs, complexity, and lead-time of printing deeply affected the industry, leading to a widening gap between commercial printing and fine printing. [15] For example, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was originally published by a high-volume commercial printer according to its house rules and it was not until its third publication that Eliot was satisfied with its typesetting. [16] The underlying reasons were: [15]

Before the First World War virtually all English-language books were printed following standard typesetters' spacing rules. By the end of the Second World War most American books and an increasing proportion of English books were printed following the typewriter's English spacing approximation rules. [17] Around this time, the practice of single spacing became more prevalent. There were various circumstances which could have contributed to the change. For example, there was an increase in high-volume low-cost mass-produced printing (e.g., newspapers, pulp novels, magazines). Also, a significant innovation in the typewriter was the breaking of the typewriter "grid" in 1941. “The grid” referred to the uniform spacing of each letter space in the monospaced font used by the typewriter. In 1941, IBM introduced the Executive , a typewriter that used proportional spacing by breaking each cell of the grid into fifths. [18] Although proportional fonts had been used in various forms in typesetting since the invention of movable type, this innovation broke the hold that the monospaced font had over the typewriter—reducing the severity of its mechanical limitations.

During the 1950s, single sentence spacing became the standard commercial practice in mass-print-runs in the United States. However, double sentence spacing approximations were retained in some higher-cost printed works. For example, for reasons of readability, the US government's 1959 official style guide mandated double sentence spacing in all government documents—whether produced by “teletypesetter, reproduction or other method”. [19] Single sentence spacing was introduced by professional printers in the United Kingdom as well. The 1947 version of Penguin Composition Rules stated that all Penguin publications would adhere to the following rules: “All major punctuation marks –full point, colon, and semicolon –should be followed by the same spacing as is used throughout the rest of the line.” [20]

Until about the early 1990s, [21] double sentence spacing was still referred to as English spacing (or “American typewriter spacing”).

The computer era

The introduction and widespread adoption of non-commandline desktop publishing software on personal computers in the mid-1980s eliminated previous cost-restrictions that had helped fuel the switch to single-spacing. There was no longer any material marginal cost associated with typesetting double-spaces, or even multiple-width spaces. Despite this, resistance to double-spaced sentences started to grow among English-language professional designers and typographers as they became more directly involved with typesetting. Traditional French typists' rules continued to be the uncontested norm in French-speaking countries, [22] but English spacing became increasingly deprecated in English-speaking countries.

By the mid-1990s, the term French spacing was occasionally used in America in reference to double sentence spacing. An example of this apparent terminology reversal can be attributed to the University of Chicago Press in 1994. [23] By the mid-2000s this usage had been widely replicated on the Internet, for unclear reasons.

Additionally, there has been a designer-led trend towards closer-fitted text in general. [24] For example, an increasing number of computer font design guidelines now recommend the use of quarter-em spaces rather than third-em spaces. With regard to spacing, modern designers are retracing the steps of the 19th-century design-led typographer William Morris. Morris rejected the restrictions of commercial typesetting which at the time demanded traditional typesetting's spacing rules, and, declaring a "rage for beauty", advocated close-set type and dark "colour" (lack of whitespace, creating uniformity of appearance). However, the reason Donald Knuth gave for creating the TeX typesetting system was his dismay on receiving the proofs of a new edition of his book The Art of Computer Programming at the unreadability of the then new close-fitted phototypesetting technology, which he described as "awful" due to its "poor spacing". [25] [26] The leading style guides of Morris's time documented that readers of the time had the same reaction to Morris's output as Knuth did later to phototypesetting's output. De Vinne, for example, wrote in The Practice of Typography:

Printed words need the relief of a surrounding blank as much as figures in a landscape need background or contrast, perspective or atmosphere. (p. 182)
White space is needed to make printing comprehensible. (page 183)

And in Modern Book Composition he wrote:

Unleaded and thin-spaced composition is preferred by the disciples of William Morris, but it is not liked by the average reader, who does need a perceptible white blank between words or lines of print. During the fifteenth century, when thin leads and graduated spaces were almost unknown and but little used, the reading world had its surfeit of close-spaced and solid typesetting. (p. 105)

Varying the spacing between sentences, and using the changing spacing to encode information, are a standard method of steganography, hiding secret information in public documents. [27]

See also

General

Related Research Articles

Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels, and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.

The hyphen‐ is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation.

In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, speech marks, quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name. Quotation marks may be used to indicate that the meaning of the word or phrase they surround should be taken to be different from that typically associated with it, and are often used in this way to express irony. They are also sometimes used to emphasise a word or phrase, although this is usually considered incorrect.

In writing, a space is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables and other written or printed glyphs (characters). Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere". They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emphasis (typography)</span> Typographical distinction

In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.

Proofreading is an iterative process of comparing galley proofs against the original manuscripts or graphic artworks to identify transcription errors in the typesetting process. In the past, proofreaders would place corrections or proofreading marks along the margins. In modern publishing, material is generally provided in electronic form, traditional typesetting is no longer used and thus this kind of transcription no longer occurs.

In typography, leading is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.

In word processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space, also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space, is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position. In some formats, including HTML, it also prevents consecutive whitespace characters from collapsing into a single space. Non-breaking space characters with other widths also exist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Point (typography)</span> Measurement unit used in typography

In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout printing's history. Since the 18th century, the size of a point has been between 0.18 and 0.4 millimeters. Following the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, digital printing has largely supplanted the letterpress printing and has established the desktop publishing (DTP) point as the de facto standard. The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an inch (⁠1/72⁠ × 25.4 mm ≈ 0.353 mm) and, as with earlier American point sizes, is considered to be 1⁄12 of a pica.

Letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent typographical adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is distinct from kerning, which adjusts the spacing of particular pairs of adjacent characters such as "7." which would appear to be badly spaced if left unadjusted, and leading, the spacing between lines.

Sentence spacing concerns how spaces are inserted between sentences in typeset text and is a matter of typographical convention. Since the introduction of movable-type printing in Europe, various sentence spacing conventions have been used in languages with a Latin alphabet. These include a normal word space, a single enlarged space, and two full spaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">River (typography)</span> Coincidental alignment of spaces in typesetting

In typography, rivers are gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. Rivers can occur regardless of the spacing settings, but are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts. Rivers are less noticeable with proportional fonts, due to narrow spacing. Another cause of rivers is the close repetition of a long word or similar words at regular intervals, such as "maximization" with "minimization" or "optimization".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California job case</span> Case with compartments to store the movable type used in letterpress printing

A California job case is a kind of type case: a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing. It was the most popular and accepted of the job case designs in America. The California job case took its name from the Pacific Coast location of the foundries that made the case popular.

The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the en dash–, generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash—, longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar―, whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.

The full stop, period, or full point. is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence.

Sentence spacing guidance is provided in many language and style guides. The majority of style guides that use a Latin-derived alphabet as a language base now prescribe or recommend the use of a single space after the concluding punctuation of a sentence.

Sentence spacing in digital media concerns the horizontal width of the space between sentences in computer- and web-based media. Digital media allow sentence spacing variations not possible with the typewriter. Most digital fonts permit the use of a variable space or a no-break space. Some modern font specifications, such as OpenType, have the ability to automatically add or reduce space after punctuation, and users may be able to choose sentence spacing variations.

A typographic approximation is a replacement of an element of the writing system with another glyph or glyphs. The replacement may be a nearly homographic character, a digraph, or a character string. An approximation is different from a typographical error in that an approximation is intentional and aims to preserve the visual appearance of the original. The concept of approximation also applies to the World Wide Web and other forms of textual information available via digital media, though usually at the level of characters, not glyphs.

In typography, a quad was a metal spacer used in letterpress typesetting. The term was later adopted as the generic name for two common sizes of spaces in typography, regardless of the form of typesetting used. An em quad is a space that is one em wide; as wide as the height of the font. An en quad is a space that is one en wide: half the width of an em quad.

Vari-Typer is the brand name of a variable-spacing typewriter used between the 1930s and the early 1980s in printing, as well as for the production of office documents of typographic quality.

References

Citations

  1. ↑ Jacobi, Charles Thomas (1890) Printing London: C. Whittingham; Jacobi, Charles Thomas (1892) Some Notes on Books and Printing; a Guide for Authors, Publishers, & Others, New and enl. Ed. London: C. Whittingham
  2. 1 2 MacKellar, Thomas (1866) The American Printer: A Manual of Typography, Containing Complete Instructions for Beginners, as Well as Practical Directions for Managing Every Department of a Printing Office Philadelphia; MacKellar Smiths & Jordan; Harpel, Oscar (1870) Harpel's Typograph, or Book of Specimens Containing Useful Information, Suggestions and a Collection of Examples of Letterpress Job Printing Arranged for the Assistance of Master Printers, Amateurs, Apprentices, and Others Cincinnati Press; Bishop, Henry Gold (1895) The Practical Printer: A Book of Instruction for Beginners; a Book of Reference for the More Advanced, 3rd. ed. Albany; De Vinne, Theodore Low (1901) The Practice of Typography: correct composition: a treatise on spelling, abbreviations, the compounding and division of words, the proper use of figures and numerals. With observations on punctuation and proof-reading. New York, Century Co.
  3. ↑ Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie nationale (3rd ed.). Imprimerie nationale. 1993.
  4. ↑ Nelson, Julius (1949). Stylebook for Typists. New York: Gregg Publishing Company.
  5. ↑ Igot, Pierre (2006) Microsoft Word and non-breaking spaces: French typography 101
  6. ↑ Gordon, Lyndall (1999). T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1st American ed.). W.W. Norton & Company.
  7. ↑ Romano, Frank J. (1 October 1988). Desktop typography with QuarkXPress. Windcrest. p. 92. ISBN   978-0-8306-9323-8.
  8. ↑ Step-by-step Graphics. Dynamic Graphics, Incorporated. 1994. p. 103.
  9. ↑ Helmut Kopka; Patrick W. Daly (June 1995). A guide to Latex2[epsilon]: document preparation for beginners and advanced users. Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. p. 45.
  10. ↑ Ron Goldberg (2000). Digital Typography Pocket Primer. Windsor Professional Information. pp.  61. ISBN   978-1-893190-05-4.
  11. ↑ TUGboat. TEX Users Group. 1995. p. 219.
  12. ↑ C. E. Nicholson; Edward J. Triebe; John H. Esak (1944). Book production: How? Why? When?. American Institute of Graphic Arts. p. 7.
  13. ↑ Book Production Procedures for Today's Technology (Second ed.). Inkwell Publishing. 15 January 2006. p. 201. ISBN   978-1-929163-21-2.
  14. ↑ "Inland Printer, American Lithographer". 145. Maclean-Hunter Publishing Company. April 1960: 71.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  15. 1 2 Keefe, H. J. (1939). A Century in Print - The Story of Hazell's - 1839-1939. London: Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd.
  16. ↑ Rainey, Lawrence (2005) The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose New Haven: Yale University Press
  17. ↑ e.g., Standard typesetters' spacing rules: Linklater, Eric (1954) A year of space The Reprint Society, London; e.g., English spacing: Gordon, Richard (1955) Doctor in the House; Doctor at Sea The Reprint Society, London; e.g., English spacing: Leslie, Doris (1956) Peridot Flight The Book Club, London
  18. ↑ Wershler-Henry, Darren (2005). The Iron Whim A Fragmented History of Typewriting . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p.  254. ISBN   978-0-8014-4586-6.
  19. ↑ United States Government Printing Office Style Manual (1959), paragraph 2.36.1
  20. ↑ Jan Tschichold (18 October 2010). "Jan Tschichold: Penguin composition rules (1947)". Oliver Tomas. Retrieved 4 December 2010.
  21. ↑ Siebenmann, Laurent (1993). "A Format Compilation Framework for European Languages" (PDF). TUGboat. pp. 212–221. ISSN   0896-3207. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2009-10-03.
  22. ↑ FRENCH STYLE GUIDE – A Reference Document (2001) Nova Scotia Department of Education
  23. ↑ Eckersley, Richard (1994). Glossary of Typesetting Terms. University of Chicago Press. p. 46. ISBN   978-0-226-18371-8.
  24. ↑ Dowding, G. (1954) Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type Wace & Co.: London; Felici 2003; Bringhurst 2004.
  25. ↑ Knuth, Donald (1986) Remarks to celebrate the publication of Computers and Typesetting Archived 2011-03-15 at the Wayback Machine Address delivered at the Computer Museum in Boston on May 21, 1986. The full text can be found in TUGboat, 7 (1986), 95–98
  26. ↑ Seroul, Raymond; and Levy, Silvio (1991) A Beginners Book of TeX Springer-Verlag, pp 1-2
  27. ↑ Bender, W.; Gruhl, D.; Morimoto, N.; Lu, A. (1996), "Techniques for data hiding" (PDF), IBM Systems Journal, 35 (3/4): 313–336, doi:10.1147/sj.353.0313 .

Sources

  • Bringhurst, Robert (2004). The Elements of Typographic Style (3.0 ed.). Washington and Vancouver: Hartley & Marks. ISBN   978-0-88179-206-5.
  • Dowding, Geoffrey (1995). Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type (Revised ed.). Vancouver, BC: Hartley & Marks Publishers. ISBN   978-0-88179-119-8.
  • Felici, James (2003). The Complete Manual of Typography. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press. ISBN   978-0-321-12730-3.
  • MacKellar, Thomas (1885). The American Printer: A Manual of Typography, Containing Practical Directions for Managing all Departments of a Printing Office, As Well as Complete Instructions for Apprentices: With Several Useful Tables, Numerous Schemes for Imposing Forms in Every Variety, Hints to Authors, Etc (Fifteenth, Revised and Enlarged ed.). Philadelphia: MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan.
  • Wershler-Henry, Darren (2005). The Iron Whim A Fragmented History of Typewriting . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN   978-0-8014-4586-6.
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