{"id":994,"date":"2020-05-04T17:49:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-05T00:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/?p=994"},"modified":"2020-05-29T10:56:18","modified_gmt":"2020-05-29T17:56:18","slug":"trump-and-two-spaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/trump-and-two-spaces\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump and Two Spaces"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently came across a copy of the COVID-19 economic relief explanation letter being sent out by the White House here in the United States:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/economic-letter.jpg \"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/economic-letter.jpg\" width=\"250\" height=\"330\" alt=\"economic relief explanation letter\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>What was interesting to me was not the contents of this letter, but rather the spacing after each period.<\/p>\n<p>You can see that there are two spaces after nearly every period. That standard is pass\u00e9 now (so much so that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2020\/4\/24\/21234170\/microsoft-word-two-spaces-period-error-correction-great-space-debate\">Microsoft Word is now flagging two spaces after a period as an error<\/a>). The use of two spaces was not surprising. What is unexpected is that sentences starting with the letter &#8220;A&#8221; don&#8217;t appear to be preceded by two spaces:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/economic-letter-As.jpg\" width=\"525\" height=\"522\"\/><\/p>\n<p>In the above comparison you&#8217;ll see that the bottom two sentences have less space after the period, before the letter A. It looks like a single space to me. Only sentences beginning with the letter A have this reduced spacing.<\/p>\n<p>These spacing differences could be explained by <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kerning\">kerning<\/a> if they occurred within a word. Fonts usually customize the space between adjacent printable characters based on the actual letter geometry, so everything looks nice and neat. But I don&#8217;t think kerning can account for the big differences seen in this letter, especially considering the spacing variations occur for whitespace, not printable characters.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately this is pretty strange. I&#8217;ve never seen a single document intentionally use both single and double spaces after a period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently came across a copy of the COVID-19 economic relief explanation letter being sent out by the White House here in the United States: What was interesting to me&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1005,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions\/1005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}