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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

#81

Post by citrin_ru »

saagarjha wrote: post #37
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.

Consistency with what, all the other code that uses tabs?

In code which uses tabs one logical indentation level is always one tab. You can show tab with different width in you editor, but the source code is consistent.

If spaces are used you never know how many spaces is one logical level. There is no agreement - some people prefer 2 spaces, some 4 and may be somebody uses 8 or 6.

Even worse - I sometimes see when in a single source file some parts use 2 spaces for one logical indent and some - 4 spaces.

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

#82

Post by insulanian »

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've started using Typora [1] recently. It's the best of both worlds.

[1] https://typora.io

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

#83

Post by sosborn »

PunksATawnyFill wrote: post #76
Gibbon1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it is usually incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...

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

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #80

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.

> So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else.

In larger teams and companies, changes move pretty slow through the design-development-QA pipeline. Maybe this change was made a year ago, and worked its way through the pipes only now?

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

#85

Post by jfk13 »

svat wrote: post #57
peterkelly wrote: post #42

The whole debate over one space vs. two is just stupid. TeX got it right 40 years ago, recognising that it's no longer necessary to constrain ourselves to a integral number of space characters (a holdover from the typewriter era), but instead to use what it calls "glue" as separators between characters, words, and sentences. Glue between words is given a higher weighting than that between characters. Glue between sen…

Minor quibble: having a non-integral “number” of spaces was not a TeX innovation; Knuth was just reproducing standard practice of fine typography. Using variable-width separators (TeX “glue”) is exactly how human typesetters did it for centuries. So it's not quite the right perspective to consider anything “a holdover from the typewriter era”, because that had never been typographical practice in the first place — in…

> with TeX's standard settings, the inter-sentence space has the same natural width as the inter-word space

That's not quite accurate; the inter-sentence space does have a slightly larger natural width as well as more stretchability. It's right there in Chapter 12 of The TeXbook:

> "Plain TeX puts extra space at the end of a sentence; furthermore, it automatically increases the stretchability (and decreases the shrinkability) after punctuation marks."

Specifically, in the default cmr10 font, a normal inter-word space is 3.33333pt, and an end-of-sentence space has an additional 1.11111pt (before any stretch or shrink is applied).

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

#86

Post by TeMPOraL »

jlokier wrote: post #60

I found these two thoughtful Wikipedia articles give an interesting background. I didn't know Vi and Emacs used to recognise double spacing as an end-of-sentence navigation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_me...

It's still a configurable in Emacs. In particular, it's controlled by the sentence-end-double-space variable, which on my Emacs (27, built a little over a year ago) was still set to true by default, i.e. considering sentences to be separated by double spaces. I have a line in my config that disables this, as I'm used to the single-space tradition.

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

#87

Post by jfk13 »

DanBC wrote: post #65
basicallydan wrote: post #10

This may not seem like a big deal, but consider the effect that such an influential source of “correctness” can have on the general sense of what is correct. Spell checkers like Word’s are responsible for the “z” in British English being demonised. Once upon a time, according to linguist Gretchen McCullen, it was common in British English to use both z and s. But somewhere along the line, automated spell checkers cat…

But the confusion has been around a lot longer than spellchecks have been in common use. -ize Vs -ize was a plot point in a 1987 episode of Inspector Morse: https://jeremybutterfield.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/ise-or-iz...

> -ize Vs -ize was a plot point

Amusingly, I suspect autocorrect may have destroyed your point here!

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

#88

Post by imustbeevil »

gonehome wrote: post #39
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)

Yeah I was forced to do this as a child when writing typed stuff in school and wish I hadn’t, hopefully won’t be too hard to relearn. We were also forced to have perfect MLA citations in high school where the librarian had to sign off on it and you had to go rewrite it for any arbitrary little thing - what a monumental waste of time. They probably still make the students do that.

When I was in school they still had us using MLA but there were sites you could post any URL or book title and it would generate the citation for you.

Given the seeming inability of many people to gauge the voracity of primary sources, I'm not so sure the teachers were wrong in this case. I know I liked reading wikipedia and copying the sources from there, but there's something to be said for teaching exactly how unreliable a source is based on the inability to properly cite it.

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

#89

Post by TeMPOraL »

chispamed wrote: post #69
thefifthsetpin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below? Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.

Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert “fi” into a character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so there’s definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.

Are fonts Turing-complete now? I have a feeling they'll become such if not already there; a little programs, complete with configuration switches so that you can control if and how a combination of characters get converted into a ligature depending on surrounding context.

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

#90

Post by KMag »

robbrown451 wrote: post #77
sjwright wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I think the GP is distinguishing between an ignored space and an ignored press of the space bar. The GGP was saying that in Lyx, the extra space in the source doesn't show up in there rendered document.

I think the GP was saying that a WYSIWYG editor can't ignore a space. I think the GP is saying a WYSIWYG editor could ignore a keypress and not insert the space, but if it puts a space in the source... it has to be in the rendered output, as there's little to no distinction between source and rendered output in a WYSIWYG editors.

Now, I think there's some middle ground, where a WYSIWYG editor could insert a zero-width space for the second space bar press, but I think that would be very confusing for most users and of very little practical benefit, even for power users.

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