French spacing (English)
The term
French spacing most often refers to the
typographical practice of adding two
spaces (rather than a single space) after a
full stop (period), and sometimes for a
colon as well. The practice is derived from
monospaced
fonts used with
typewriters.
[One Versus Two Spaces After a Period - Webword, 13 May 1999] Some authors consider that text using French spacing looks better than text written with only one space after a full stop; others think that
proportionally spaced fonts have made French spacing redundant. A third view is that it is dependent on the typeface itself. There is no one correct answer according to the
Chicago Manual of Style, widely accepted as an authority on such conventions.
The term may be derived from the difficulty of adding double spaces to text that is typeset using a
hot metal Linotype machine. Spaces were added to the text using
wedges, which automatically fully
justified the text, but two normal wedges together introduced problems. A
workaround using an
en space followed by a thin justifier-space was thought to be "fancy" (or "French") and cost extra.
Some computer text editors, such as
Emacs and
vi, rely on French spacing to divide text into sentences. The
GNU Coding Standards recommend using two spaces for this reason.
[GNU Coding Standards ยง5.2 Commening your work] However, some software, such as
Web browsers following the
HTML specifications, ignore runs of
white space when displaying them.
There are other instances in which the French practises of typography are applied to English texts, and these are also referred to as French spacing. For example, the photographic reprint of
E. H. Carr's
The Twenty Years' Crisis (Harper Collins Perennial, 2001) has unusually wide spacing not only after periods, but also after colons and
semicolons; it has spaces before the latter two marks as well, another French typographical practice.
Quotation marks, though they are doubled as in U.S. practise, also have a series of adjustments deriving from French typographical style. For every passage enclosed by the marks, a space follows the opening set of quotation marks, and one usually also precedes the closing set, unless the text ends in a period, question mark, or exclamation point in the original. If there is not one of these three stops or a comma between the closing quotation mark and a superscripted reference number for a footnote, a space is added to separate them.
*
Typeface, including discussion on
proportionality*
Leading*
Plenk,
Klempen
