JD750 Loc: SoCal

One or two is a style choice.

As I said earlier, allowing the software guys to dictate your style is like allowing your car mechanic to dictate where you go on vacation.

drucker Loc: Oregon

I wonder how many younger readers will stumble over "carriage return."

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

"CRLF"

They'll drop the "carriage" because there is none.
Wait, what's a carriage...

drucker Loc: Oregon

I spent 60+ years in the printing industry, with most of that time in typesetting, design, and editing/proofreading. In the beginning, a composing stick was in my hand much of the time and I was setting handset type. If not that, I was redistributing what I had set the day or week before.

The goal of good typesetting is primarily legibility. Exactly what it takes to achieve that goal varies widely depending on who is setting the rules. We had shop standards for various kinds of work only to be superseded by the demands of individual customers.

The typesetting case has many options for spacing not even dreamed of by those sitting at a keyboard—unless that keyboard is controlling an advanced specialized typesetting program. Metal type sizes in the USA 1886 are defined in points based on the overall size of the body of each piece of type from top to bottom. The size of the printed type varied depending on the style of the type and how much minimum space the designer wanted between the lines. There are approximately 72 points in an inch and it would seem that 18-point type would all be the same size—about 1/4-inch high less the amount the designer allowed for space between the lines. But alas, the visual size varies greatly. Many traditional styles used in books have long ascenders and descenders leaving only maybe 1/4th of the total vertical space for the bowl of the lowercase letters—known as the "x-height." Another typestyle might have very short ascenders and descenders leaving nearly half of the vertical height for the bowl of the lowercase letters.

Horizontal spacing is historically described in ems, with an "em" being a square of the body size of the type. The next size down is the "en" that is half the width of an em. Smaller sizes are referred to as fractions of an em—"3 to em," "4 to em," etc. In smaller sizes, the smallest cast space is usually 1½ or 2 points thick. The range of sizes increase as the type gets larger. For really close spacing, 1-pt brass and 1/2-pt copper spaces are usually available.

The choice of what word spacing and sentence spacing is used varies by the design width of the typeface with word spacing tending to be slightly wider as the size set smaller. Ease of reading depends greatly on the ability to easily separate and define the shape of words. An oft-used rule is to use the width of the lowercase "t" in the font being used as word spacing. Those, like myself, that feel additional space between sentences contributes to ease of reading, might choose to use double the word spacing.

It's hard to know exactly what contributed most to today's emphasis on "single" spaces between sentences. I've lived through several generations of typesetting systems. In some early ones, the programs couldn't deal with double spaces. They were barely able to rejustify text into different column widths and single spaces at the end of sentences were required if you didn't want the second space to appear at the beginning of the next line when a new line break happened at the end of a sentence.

The other driving force has been the design concept that type blocks should be a uniform "grey" and "double" or additional end-of-sentence spacing interferes with that concept.

drucker Loc: Oregon

Sorry, that is not "kerning"—it's just a good example that a variable-width typestyle is being used, as opposed to a mono-spaced font where each 10-character-line would be the same length.

"Kerning" is the adjustment of spacing between any two letters, punctuation mark, or symbols to make the space between all elements appear even. Each character of a variable width font is given a specific width to accommodate its planned design. This includes a small amount of whitespace on each side of the letter that when combined with the whitespace on the side of the adjoining letter will give the appearance of even spacing as the word is assembled. Thus, a straight vertical edge of a letter will usually have a little more space than a curved letter like an "o."

This works for most letter combinations but then there are the oddball combinations like: AWA ATA AVAVAT A" Too Two AT, "one."

AAAAAAAAAAAA
VVVVVVVVVVVV
AVAVAVAVAVAV

VVVVVVVVVVVV............
V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.

TTTTTTTTTTTToooooooooooo
ToToToToToToToToToToToTo

............""""""""""""
."."."."."."."."."."."."

AAAAAAAAAAAAA""""""""""""
A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"


To handle the oddball combinations, the type font may contain a kerning table that includes a set of rules and/or a listing of actual pairs of letters giving the exact number of units of space to be removed from between each combination of letters listed. The kerning table may include thousands of pairs depending on the needs of the design. Most modern fonts contain kerning tables and most modern applications use them but sometimes the option needs to be turn on. Previously disk space and the computing power needed to use and display the results was a concern. Not so much today.

We'll see how the examples actually post. Most of the examples show kerning as I type with the exception of the quotes following the period. That just means that the font currently being used doesn't have a definition for that pair. The font I use most often would have moved the end quotes over the period somewhat so that the quotes don't look like they are just hanging out in nowhere land. If it was a personal font I'd probably go into it with a font editor and add the pair to the table, but when you are on the web, you just usually have to take what you get!

drucker Loc: Oregon

I was thinking of an actual typewriter when I wrote that comment. "CRLF" hasn't been something I've typed recently! But it and like ilk of other printer commands, screen control commands, and disk control commands still reside somewhere in the little-used grey matter. A slipcase of Wordstar manuals and 5" discs and some other programming manuals reside above my desk as a reminder of what once was. Today, interface programs perform and mask most of the drudge work of HTML although it's amazing how many keyboard shortcuts I use every day hark back to Wordstar.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

The drudgery of HTML (& PHP)?
I hand code my website. (As well as a dozen others I've built in the past for people.). It exercises my grey matter. I don't do website builders, so I'm left to my own demise for the layout.
Except the gallery program, I use (Coppermine Photo Gallery - CPG), that reduces my coding time a LOT.
I used to code my own gallery routine, but when I found CPG years ago, I implemented it. It's SO much less work.
Yup, I still have my HTML, PHP, CSS, and Java Script manuals.
I've been writing code for about 50 years in over 12 languages on various systems. It's in my blood.

TreborLow

Thanks for the clear explanation of kerning and variable width characters. Can you please also explain the procedure to "right justify" text. Is that a special form of kerninng or some other procedure?

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Thank you for that detailed explanation of typesetting! It fascinates me the amount of depth to this subject! It is said Steve Jobs understood the importance of different fonts and carried that over to the Mac computer software. Have you found that to be true?

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

The Apple keyboard has a Return key. I'm surprised that such a forward-thinking company would retain something that most people don't recognize.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I wonder when they'll change it to Next Line key.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

My MacBook Air has both "return" and "enter" on the key.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

I would be curious to know how you are going to write code or type a document without the return key.
Of course you could call it something else but a key is definitely needed to denote the end of the line and start a new line.

And perhaps you forget when computers evolved, people were still using typewriters and knew what a carriage return was. Technically it's a carriage return and a line feed. ;)

I guess you could call it "cursor return" today.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

When I was in Grad School, some hacker ran a program that sent a job to the printer that included a couple hundred lines of all asterisks. The lines were separated by a carriage return but no line feed. The result was that the printer would cut through the paper at that point and jam.

************************************************************************************** It wasn't me.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I think he means "enter" as opposed to "return", eliminating the return connotation, not eliminating the key itself.
But enter and return are two different logical functions. The both simply use the same key.