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posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 11 2018, @12:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the BBC-thinks-it's-a-paragraph-break-after-a-period dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

In what may be one of the most controversial studies of the year, researchers at Skidmore College—clearly triggered by a change in the American Psychological Association (APA) style book—sought to quantify the benefits of two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. After conducting an eye-tracking experiment with 60 Skidmore students, Rebecca L. Johnson, Becky Bui, and Lindsay L. Schmitt found that two spaces at the end of a period slightly improved the processing of text during reading. The research was trumpeted by some press outlets as a vindication of two-spacers' superiority.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/two-spaces-after-period-are-better-than-one-except-maybe-they-arent-study-finds/


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  • (Score: 2) by anotherblackhat on Friday May 11 2018, @03:18PM

    by anotherblackhat (4722) on Friday May 11 2018, @03:18PM (#678415)

    The article makes it sound like "space" was an actual thing placed in documents.
    I know about word-break, sentence-break, and paragraph-break, but how those are actually displayed is determined by the users style choice isn't it?
    I mean, sure, sentence break is usually represented by a period, though it's sometimes a question mark, or an exclamation point, but it might be nothing (like when a sentence ends with an abbreviation.)
    There are even times when it's displayed as a dot before the last character.

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