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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...
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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…
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?
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.
That's not really an argument. Every code editor can be configured to interpret the tab key as desired number of spaces.
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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…
if you were going to do that, i think you should render two half width spaces rather than a full width and a zero width, so the cursor still moves naturally.
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I believe the software should add wide spaces after periods correctly, and not the user. Two reasons: first, two spaces is too big a separation between sentences. Second, it's really hard to maintain consistency (or ensure that there's consistency) in the use of double spacing without the help of software. It's easy to miss when reviewing. Let the software do this menial task. That's what computers are for, aren't th…
A wide space after a period is only sensible when the period ends a sentence.
[1] yeah, I could call it a period or a full stop. But its also a dot. Variety is the spice of life as is properly finishing your
See https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracl... for a great article on the history of wider spaces between sentences — how there were two traditions of typography and things started to shift towards equal spaces in the 1930s–1960s (i.e. inter-sentence space being the same as the inter-word space). I'm even holding on my lap right now a book published in 1957 by a reputed publisher (Parkinson's Law…
I don't strictly oppose this typographical tradition; my native tongue has many widths of spaces (in particular between a measurement and the unit there should be a slightly narrower space) and I'm used to it. What I dislike strongly is this idea that one should alter the source manuscript to emulate these typographical conventions. It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. They are…
Using a double space is a simple way of telling the computer that you want a wider space, because otherwise it can't tell that you mean the end of a sentence.
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…