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[andrew clarke]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 05:50:04AM -0500, David J Brooks wrote:

> > The difference for you with untrained eyes is the double spacing after
> > the dot instead of the standard single spacing.
> >
> > I was just curious if there's a reason to this or not.
> 
> Back in the Jurassic era, when typewriters still roamed the earth, it was a 
> convention to leave a double-space following a period so that the reader 
> could more easily distinguish the end of a sentence. With the advent of word 
> processors (and proportional fonts) this double-spacing convention lapsed.

For those playing at home, this is called "French spacing":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_spacing_(English)