atw: Re: Tell the U.S. Marines to Getz Tuft

It is always interesting to discover a bizarre enthusiasm. This meandering thread started off with observations on one space vs. two after a full stop. Google searches on "two spaces after a full stop" and "two spaces after a period" produced almost thirty thousand results. There are people out there who care deeply about this stuff.
But why? The typewriter age is dead. I suspect that there are no typewriter manufacturers left in the First World. There appear to be no typewriter shops. The typewriter mechanics have all retired. If you actually want to buy a typewriter, your best bet is an antique shop. Or a trip to India.
The only writers who are required to produce final output to the old typewriter standards are fiction writers preparing manuscripts for submission to publishers. Any publisher's website will set out the rules: monospaced font, one-inch margins, double-spaced, and so on.
These rules are not imposed by publishers for any aesthetic reason, or to meet any readability criterion. Publishers have formulas for calculating the probable length and production cost of a book from the size of the manuscript produced in the standard form. Publishers have maintained their manuscript requirements in the face of the computer revolution, because they are useful to them.
Does this matter to us? Of course not. We do not produce fiction manuscripts for submission, but formatted works that look a bit like books. We are publishers as well as writers, and our formatting requirements are influenced more by typography than by typewriters. 

JH



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