French spacing

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This article is about a typographical convention used in English text. For information on French typography, see Punctuation in French.

An example of French spacing between two sentences

The term French spacing most often refers to the typographical practice of adding two spaces (rather than one) after a full stop (period), and sometimes for a colon as well. It also refers to placing a single space before a question or exclamation mark. The practice is derived from monospaced fonts used with typewriters.^[1] 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. Several widely-used style guides, including the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press, call for a single space after a full stop.^[2]^[3] Some style guides allow for author and editor preference, but are increasingly guiding authors away from French spacing.

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 (it can, however, be changed in modern Emacsen such as Gnu Emacs and XEmacs, and in the vi clone Vim.) The GNU Coding Standards recommend using two spaces for this reason.^[4] However, some software, such as Web browsers following the HTML specifications, ignore runs of white space when displaying them^[5] (although a web browser may be forced to display such spacing using the sequence &ensp;  for an en-space followed by a thin space, or &emsp; for an em-space).^[6] The typesetting software TeX by Donald Knuth also treats runs of whitespace as a single space, but typesets using French spacing (an option which can be turned off using a command confusingly named \frenchspacing, and back on using \nonfrenchspacing).

There are other instances in which the French practices 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. practice, 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 original text ends in a period, question mark, or exclamation point. 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.

With modern word processors, it is possible to use a global 'replace' operation to convert French spacing to single spacing. It is not generally as simple to perform this operation in the other direction, however, because spaces that follow abbreviations would be expanded incorrectly.