[Tex/LaTex] Double space between sentences

frenchspacingspacingtypography

I've been reading a question on spaces between sentences on a sister site. The answers there seem to imply that the days of double spacing between sentences are over, and that this was a relic of the type-writer and mono-spaced fonts. I was a little surprised by this, so I took a look in two magazines I have at hand: The New Yorker, and The Economist. I was surprised to notice that indeed, it doesn't seem that they use double-space between sentences.

Are we (*TeX users) "behind the times"? Or are we in the right and everyone else is trying to save a space in an inappropriate place? Perhaps this is just laziness of modern type-setters and editors (since they don't use LaTeX…).
What is the typesetters' professional opinion about this?

Finally, to make the question relevant to this site: What command will make my documents look like that too (If I wanted so…)? In other words, how to cancel this double-space between sentences, and make the spacing always single space?

Best Answer

Use the \frenchspacing command; that makes the sentence spacing single spaced. You can revert it later on in the document via \nonfrenchspacing.

Personally I don't care either way about the spacing after a full stop. I tend not to notice it when I am reading anyway. I do, however, find that with paper drafts I'm editing, it is easier to visually locate the start/end of a sentence with the extra bit of padding.