My LPW instructor last semester said that in legal writing, we should use two spaces after a period. Is this just another arbitrary rule--like countless others in the Bluebook--that we should blindly obey? Ironically, I don't think the "two-space" rule is even a rule in the super comprehensive Bluebook. Isn't one space sufficient and more efficient? What we do we gain by tapping the space bar one more time (obviously, we don't lose much either, but I'd prefer not to)?

Here's an interesting article that argues that we should never use two spaces after a period: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html

Do others have any thoughts on the seemingly arbitrary "two-space" rule?

-- DanielChung - 09 Apr 2012

You're asking a question which implies stupid document-making programs like Microbrain Word.

In English, the typesetter's convention to leave more than a single interword space between sentences is several centuries old. Those of us who read in both English and French, where the typesetter's convention is to leave only an interword space between sentences, may differ in our opinions, but I believe extra spacing is an aid to readability.

But sensible document composition doesn't require the human being to type an extra space when entering text. Sensible document preparation software does typesetting based on easy conventions for the typist, like entering email messages, where only disciplined typists trained in the 20th century will enter two spaces. Text when rendered in print should be respaced by the rendering program. But the spacing used on a printed page should be flexible within and between words, as well as between sentences, lines and paragraphs. All the spacing on a printed page should be balanced harmoniously, which good document production software, like the free software standard TeX, does. TeX, and its fellow markup language LaTeX, have been producing beautiful printed text for decades; Microbrain Word has never created a single properly-composed page.

But TeX input has never required, or even paid any attention to, whether there is a second space after periods in the input; TeX is more than smart enough to deal with that, while it is doing the actual work of laying out the page, work no "word processor" ever does, or will do, but which printers spent hundreds of years learning and perfecting.

You should care about how your documents look, always. Whether on line or on paper, how your text looks affects how people understand it. You should learn about typography and layout, you should understand the literate tradition of which you are a part, you should be capable of appreciating beautiful typography and design. But you shouldn't need to type the second space after your sentences, because you should be using smart software that helps you.

(And of course, this text is rendered without regard for the spacing in the text you type in this wiki. Interword and intersentence spacing is determined by the full cascade of CSS reaching the reader's browser, not by anything you do or don't type into this file.)

I hate Microsoft Word: it can't handle large documents and crashes all the time. I actually downloaded TeX last semester but haven't learned how to use it yet. I really want to learn though--I really like the look of TeX documents. Is there a free and effective way to convert documents between Microsoft Word and TeX? I assume that most lawyers and practices still use Microsoft Office, making collaboration and communication difficult if you prefer TeX or similar software.

TeX and Microsoft Word are two fundamentally different pieces of software. I don't know if you can convert from Word to TeX since that doesn't make conceptual sense. TeX is a layout and typesetting software. You give it the content and specify the logical structure with a markup language called LaTeX. It takes that and figures out that best way for it to look.

Microsoft Word collapses content, layout and typesetting into one poorly designed process. Most of us have only ever used word processors that merge and obscure these elements of document creation, so the idea of separating content from presentation might seem foreign. But once you learn to appreciate the difference, your writing won't be encumbered by layout considerations. You can just write and let the typesetter worry about how it looks.

This is all true, but it doesn't make conversion impossible. It just makes it different. Conversion means reducing style added by the WYSIWYG word processor, like Word, replacing it with simple notation that can then be converted back to LaTeX.

HTML makes a nice intermediate format, because in order to convert to HTML the WYSIWYG program will have to turn its stupid typographical decisions back into the (somewhat more) abstracted language of HTML. So "Save As" HTML will turn the Word document into something that can be worked with.

A wonderful free software program called Pandoc, written in the language Haskell by a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley named John MacFarlane, translates all sorts of markup languages into one another. The best markup language is the least: markdown. Markdown looks like typing email. But Pandoc can turn it into wonderful LaTeX. Or make it from HTML. So the actual simplest way to convert from Word is to save as HTML, tell pandoc to make the HTML into markdown, thus removing everything but the most minimal indications of style, edit the markdown so that any style that hasn't been translated right, or that you want to add, can be added in the way simplest for the typist, and then straight to beautiful typeset pages in PDF via LaTeX, which one can in turn learn from and edit to fine tune the document. The easiest way to learn LaTeX in order to use it is to convert some of your existing documents first, via the route I've described, and then fix them, change them, rearrange them, editing the LaTeX that pandoc gave you to start from.

All this stuff really works. SFLC uses only free software to do absolutely everything that lawyers do, and many things that most lawyers wouldn't have a prayer of being able to do no matter how much they spent on "tech." We are about half LaTeX and half OpenOffice users, and we communicate documents back and forth in markdown, which is also the language of our wiki. We make Supreme Court briefs, District Court litigation paper, web publications, business correspondence, and all other forms of document workflow from the simplest typing and the most powerful and tasteful rendering, whether on paper or on the Web. You can have a law practice that interoperates with everyone about everything using only the world's best software we all make and share. Works everywhere, costs nothing, never spies on you or invades your privacy. Or you can spend the rest of your life using crap. (Of course, if you pawn your license, someone else will impose technology on you, and it will probably be shit. But they'll be doing that to the rest of your life, too, so what else would you expect?)

I learned LaTeX with this tutorial.

Once you get your feet wet, this book is an excellent reference to have.

(Also, TeX is pronounced 'tech' not 'tecks.' The X on the end is the Greek letter chi.)

To go back to your original comment, Daniel, my LPW instructor last semester told me NOT to use two spaces after every sentence. According to him, the latest version of the Chicago Manual of Style changed the rule to only one space. So it depends on which style book you follow. Which we will, sadly, probably have to be seriously concerned with as lawyers I suppose.

No, that's yet another confusion between typing and rendering. The Chicago Manual says you don't need to add the extra space preparing manuscripts: if the renderer gives you French spacing (as your browser is doing with this wiki text right now, for example), that's not a style violation anymore. But good English typesetting won't change just yet, for another generation at least. So use a good renderer, like TeX, and let it take care of making your documents look good. Or use the Web, and let the browsers do almost as bad a job as Microsoft Word itself. That's why a generation ago, before Steve Jobs was evil or a genius, when he was designing the NeXT box, he wanted to use video PostScript to render everything on all displays. One of his many ideas about how to achieve digital beauty, and one of which (unlike so many of the others) I can heartily approve. But, for reasons that would be too long a story, it wasn't meant to be.

This is from Section 6.7 of the Chicago Manual: "In typeset matter, one space, not two, should be used between two sentences—whether the first ends in a period, a question mark, an exclamation point, or a closing quotation mark or parenthesis. By the same token, one space, not two, should follow a colon. When a particular design layout calls for more space between two elements—for example, between a figure number and a caption—the design should specify the exact amount of space (e.g., em space)."

Also, if you want a good instruction book on how to use LaTeX? for typing mathematical formulas, let me know. I have a good manual in PDF form.

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For the record, on the beauty/power of separating content from presentation in the web context, see CSSZenGarden. -- SanjayMurti - 10 Apr 2012