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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

#71

Post by DanielKehoe »

We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an editor at O'Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions with extra space after a period. Marc Andreessen (still at NCSA in 1993) pointed out browser developers couldn’t do the syntactic analysis required to distinguish the end of sentences from inter-sentence periods. Guido van Rossum (working on Python version 1.0 at the time) weighed in on the whitespace issue and complained “it’s mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this.” We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh?

[1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#73

Post by zonefuenf »

wodenokoto wrote: post #36
gorgoiler wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Won’t that mess up titles like Dr. Livingstone and Mr. President? Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

I usually force a narrow space after titles: Dr.\,Livingstone

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#74

Post by sjwright »

peterkelly wrote: post #48
robbrown451 wrote: post #8

That'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)

I use LyX ( https://www.lyx.org/ ) which just silently ignores the second space (acting as if you hadn't pressed the key). I think this would be a better way for Word to do it than flagging it as an error.

The problem is that Word is a WYSIWYG editor, so it can’t ignore second spaces. It must affect the layout.

(FWIW, I think WYSIWYG editors are a bad hack and should be avoided wherever possible. Either use a semantic editor or a real page layout program.)

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#75

Post by ohazi »

DanielKehoe wrote: post #71

We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an editor at O'Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions with extra space after a period. Marc Andreessen (still at NCSA in 1993) pointed out browser developers couldn’t do the syntactic analysis required to distinguish the end of sentences from inter-sentence periods. Guido van Rossum (working on Python version 1.0 at the t…

Wow, that webhistory mailing list archive is quite the treasure trove...

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#76

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #16
amanzi wrote: post #7

Great! 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.

Why?

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#77

Post by robbrown451 »

sjwright wrote: post #74
peterkelly wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LyX ( https://www.lyx.org/ ) which just silently ignores the second space (acting as if you hadn't pressed the key). I think this would be a better way for Word to do it than flagging it as an error.

The problem is that Word is a WYSIWYG editor, so it can’t ignore second spaces. It must affect the layout. (FWIW, I think WYSIWYG editors are a bad hack and should be avoided wherever possible. Either use a semantic editor or a real page layout program.)

I don't think that's what WYSIWYG means. It simply means the display onscreen is what will be printed (or otherwise what others will see)

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#78

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

pedrocx486 wrote: post #4

This reminds me of the Tabs vs Space discussion, and how once Bill Gates did an AMA on Reddit and his answer was that tabs was better because of consistency.

They’re faster to use.

They’re consistent between fonts.

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#79

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

robbrown451 wrote: post #8

That'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)

Heck no, never knuckle under and allow the computer to take over. It's there to serve you.

Re: Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

#80

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

This kind of deliberate but trivial breakage can't be an accident, and there's enought precedent ("let's screw with the VS/office interface today shall we"). So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else.

But I don't believe that 'correcting' a typographical convention is what this is directly about.

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