I know there’s probably a good technical or historical explanation, but it’s very irritating to copy/paste text into Lemmy to have it looking like poo after posting. Is there an Android editor that will add double spaces to ends of lines so it’s wysiwyg? Bonus if it will also insert "> " at the beginning of lines for quoting selected blocks of text. Maybe this can be done with a JavaScript webpage?
That comes from typewriters, before kerning was a thing. Each key press moved the paper an equal distance, so every single character was evenly spaced. Even narrow characters like i or l had the same amount of space on each side of them.
For instance, if I type out “qip” or “dib” notice that the tails for the q, p, d, and b are right next to the i? There’s not a whole lot of space on each side of the i, because the i is a very narrow character that doesn’t take up very much horizontal space. In monospaced font, that i would take up a lot more horizontal space on the line.
Monospaced font is easier to read when sentences end with a double space. It helps visually identify that a sentence has ended, and that the space isn’t simply due to a few narrow characters. But with modern kerned fonts, the double space is pointless. Phones sub in a period for simplicity, so you don’t need to reach for the period key. It doesn’t actually include the double space at all; it removes the first space and replaces it with a period. If you’re “supposed” to double space after each sentence, why does your phone remove that first space?
Ending a sentence with two spaces differentiates the end of the sentence, full stop. Kerned, monospace, serif, sans, heavy weight, light weight, double spaced lines, single spaced lines, whatever. Two spaces at the end of the sentence helps make the end of a sentence clearer in every case.