Why oh why two spaces after a period?

For the longest time, I was just plainly annoyed at people that were putting two spaces after a period. I thought it was one of those English thing. Being French myself, I learned slightly different stylistic approaches ; for example we put a non breakable space between the last word of a sentence and exclamation points or question marks. 🤷. But there is a story behind the double space usage.

Hence my sentence.  Look how I sneaked two spaces.

Today, I saw one more double space after a period in a document I reviewed and that was the last straw for me. Why some do people do it “wrong” consistently? I had to know!

Back in typewriter time fonts were just monospaced. And separation between sentences were not particularly visually obvious. So as a hack, people started to add two spaces between a period and the first letter of the next sentence.

Now, since then, something called the personal computer and proportional fonts have been invented, visually separating sentences is just fine now with a single space, especially on your 100” triple retina displays. So reading a document with double space is a possible sign that the person that wrote it has written on a typewriter in the past and stuck with the habit.

When you think about it, it’s a hack like using several spaces for indentation instead of using tab… I’m going to leave now and ironically argue with myself as I am a space person.