I posted something. Then I noticed that it was formatted wrong! I went back to fix it in edit mode. It seemed fine in edit mode. I saved it again. It was still wrong.
The thing that was wrong: In source / edit, my sentences are separated with the charcters “period space space”. This is a typing standard that improves legibility, which is extra important in effortposts. However, in the displayed mode, one of every double space had been eaten! Every post, every comment, mangled! Sentences are separated with “period space” instead of “period space space” and the text is slightly less legible for it. I noticed it for questionmark space space and exclamationmark space space as well. There’s some secret life form eating spaces.
Testing behavior: Period Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Period Space Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Period Space Space Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Yep, saw it in preview, all the spaces are getting eaten. This is a crime against good style. I won’t go so far as to say this is a hate crime against anyone who struggles with reading and visual processing… yet. But the site is editing my comment in order to enforce an objectively worse typographical standard (period singlespace). Literally 
. 
on Communist Bear Site they automatically censor out your punctuation marks in order to make your writing conform to a worse standard, calling double spaces a bourgeois decadent waste of space.
Please help
(Also, should this go in /c/technology or in /c/hexbear? It’s about both)
(Should I be submitting this as a bug report on github instead?)
If this is a bit; hilarious. If its a sincere post, then I’m sorry OP you’re a relic of a time that no longer exists. Double spacing is excellent for improving readability on monospaced fonts e.g. from typewriters or in terminal windows.
This is a sentence separated by 2 spaces.As can be seen it clearly de-marks the gap much wider than the gap between characters that occurs in monospace fonts. This helps readability.This is a sentence separated by 1 space. It is a little harder to see the period space in a monospace due to many characters having a gap between them.But this isn’t a relevant property in modern fonts that have different layout dependent not just on the character width (5 l’s take less space than 5 m’s; lllll mmmmm) but also the gaps are consistent between characters depending on the preceding and following characters, by allowing overlap in spaces by clever kerning e.g. between the Y and the o of You, note how the o sits under the arms of the Y. This means the gaps between characters on modern fonts are consistent, and the single space is clear to see for legibility. Trying to force widen the gap on a period using double spaces with modern kerning is not better for legibility and can in some instances make it worse for readability and cause other technical issues.
I’m genuinely glad you find some hilarity in my mostly serious post :) .
Thanks for the technical explanation and example about monospacing and kerning. It’s interesting and doesn’t change how I feel about the spaces, but this discussion is helping me notice some things.
Maybe it’s not “legibility” that the double space improves, but speed of recovering my place when I lose it. Or pacing. Or both. Because I definitely get lost in the text easier when there’s just the single space. I don’t know how many times a minute my eyes dart away from the text for a fraction of a second, but the number is greater than zero, and that big recognizable gap between sentences makes it easier to recover my place