Twospace

Twospace refers to a specific way of formatting text, particularly in relation to spacing after periods. Historically, typographers recommended using two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. This practice was common in the era of typewriters, where the monospace font and the mechanics of typing made a single space appear too narrow and create a visual gap that made sentences run together. The second space helped to clearly delineate the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.

With the advent of proportional fonts and digital typesetting, the necessity of the two-space convention has largely diminished. Modern word processors and typesetting software are designed to handle spacing automatically, and proportional fonts create natural visual breaks between sentences. Using two spaces after a period in contemporary digital contexts can often appear awkward or outdated, and is generally considered a stylistic error by many designers and editors. Some style guides, such as The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook, now explicitly recommend using a single space after periods. While the two-space method may still be encountered in older documents or personal writing habits, the single-space convention is the widely accepted standard for modern text.