Argh! It’s not my fault, I was brainwashed as a child. I try to keep it down to just one space but I can’t help myself. I’m the victim here!
Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
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Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#12Good. The only reason that habit is a thing is because of typewriters, which are monospaced. Some people just cargo culted the practice long past its expiration date...which makes for awkward spacing.
The practice originally came from typesetting. If anything, it's more relevant and appropriate now than it was in the days when your font choices were limited to 12-point Pica and Elite.
Programs that do typesetting for you (Markdown, LaTeX), will ignore the number of spaces after the period in your "source" code and lay it out in the output with a single space.
I've gotten in the habit of single-space in variable-width fonts, and double-space in fixed-width fonts.
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#13People have strong opinions on either side of this issue. I grew up with two spaces so anything else doesn't look correct. I did however get past indented spacing on paragraphs pretty quickly and that's mostly gone away.
Thankfully book publishers still use them so they're not going away any time soon. Sure hope that Word has a way of toggling it off.
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#14Good. The only reason that habit is a thing is because of typewriters, which are monospaced. Some people just cargo culted the practice long past its expiration date...which makes for awkward spacing.
Even on typewriters double spaces has been an English thing. In German it has never existed. And I have never noticed that it would have been difficult in reading typewritten German text because one wouldn't see where the sentences end. But then some English speakers might joke that in German you note the end of the sentence by finally hitting the last verb.
French punctuation looks weird to me, because they do require a space before and after every punctuation mark that consists of two parts (question mark, exclamation mark, French double quotes (guillemets) etc). Haven't heard that they would have ever required 2 spaces in a row, though. No idea about Spanish and other big languages.
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#15Argh! It’s not my fault, I was brainwashed as a child. I try to keep it down to just one space but I can’t help myself. I’m the victim here!
You did a great job in that comment, though :)
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#16Great! No more having to find/replace all the double-spacing in documents I review.
I came to say I know a couple of people that edit and format documents for a living and they hate getting documents with double spaces.
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#17That's pretty obnoxious. I do two spaces out of habit, and would prefer it just removed them quietly rather than forcing me to relearn. (which is what HTML does, effectively.... it displays it the same if you use two spaces)
It's a setting in the grammar checker that has always been there. Just disable it again.
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#18It seems slightly odd, given that there are different traditions of between-sentence spacing, that there doesn't seem to be a Unicode character for the kind of space between sentences.
Time to give RS a new purpose in life.
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#19It seems slightly odd, given that there are different traditions of between-sentence spacing, that there doesn't seem to be a Unicode character for the kind of space between sentences.
As with all letter spacing, the size is determined by the font metrics. There doesn't need to be a special character for it.
Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The practice originally came from typesetting. If anything, it's more relevant and appropriate now than it was in the days when your font choices were limited to 12-point Pica and Elite.
Programs that do typesetting for you (Markdown, LaTeX), will ignore the number of spaces after the period in your "source" code and lay it out in the output with a single space. I've gotten in the habit of single-space in variable-width fonts, and double-space in fixed-width fonts.
Not so for the default mode in LaTeX.
It tries to guess which periods indicate end-of-sentence (based on whether the next letter is capitalized) and will add additional horizontal space accordingly, unless you tell it not to by declaring your document uses “French Spacing”.
(Edit: and my memory may be serving me incorrectly here, but I recall 20 years ago having a support package that also detected double-space in the source as another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard extension.)