Just say no to two spaces after a period

Just say no to those two spaces after a period unless you're typing in a fixed width font, like, say, Courier. Typesetting does not require two spaces. Ever. Two spaces after proportionally spaced typeset periods creates distracting white rivers.

It comes down to this. Two spaces is fine on an old school typewriter, but nothing else. Not even calligraphy.

As a practicing dyslexic, I completely disagree with Rebecca Johnson's harebrained notion that two spaces after a period facilitates reading comprehension. Saying that it "drastically hurts our ability to read fluently" is utter rubbish. People couldn't read fluently before the advent of the fixed-spaced font typewriter? I think not.

If she had a modicum of historical perspective on typography, she'd know the origin of the two spaces after a period and how it came to be accepted. The typewriter pool. Yes. To keep keys from jamming. That's how it came to be. A freakish accident.

I too find two spaces after a period unsettling. I would question her data. And 60 people (from Skidmore) is far too slender a pool of test subjects. In the age of proportional fonts, using two spaces is retro, a dinosaur's nod to the typing pool, and it needs to stop.

Steve Jobs sat at the feet of master calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds, and then invented the proportionally spaced fonts that we ALL use today via computers, based on calligraphy, so why would we even want to go back to those mono-spaced fonts? Let the dinosaur die.