101–110 of 270 posts
They just don't get it, and perhaps won't understand the problem until it kicks them in the shin.
The appropriate counterattack might be to introduce some coding and just show how gnarly sentences are to process as a result.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. 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.
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.
Knowing that "Mr. Smith." is intra-sentence but "Me. Smith." is inter-sentence is well beyond what fonts can do, however.
If I saw that in a Word document, however, I would have thought the author was a technically-illiterate person who puts extra spaces around commas, quotes, parentheses etc. or uses 10 spaces instead of 1 tab for indentation.
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Talking typography trivia: in French language, it's mandatory to put a space before "double-characters" like : ; ? ! - the side effect is that it often allows to easily recognize a French person online even if they write in English.
Most people: Hello! How are you?
French people : Hello ! How are you ?
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...
[1] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-t...
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It's just how HTML is rendered, you'll never know whether OP used 1 or 2 spaces in that comment.
If you look at the comment through the Hacker News API, there's two spaces before the last sentence. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?pri... Although, the documentation says that field is HTML, so I'm not sure what to think. https://github.com/HackerNews/API
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I remember a typing teacher being very serious about two spaces after the dot[1]. He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a zero "0". Fortunately both of these rules are now firmly in the past along with witch burning. This is progress. [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
Interesting thing is, living in Europe, AFAIR I never heard about "use two spaces" rule until now (even if in a long monospace plaintext, I might have subconsciously used it sometimes to disambiguate). If I saw that in a Word document, however, I would have thought the author was a technically-illiterate person who puts extra spaces around commas, quotes, parentheses etc. or uses 10 spaces instead of 1 tab for indent…
Interesting thing is, living in Europe, AFAIR I never heard about "use two spaces" rule until now (even if in a long monospace plaintext, I might have subconsciously used it sometimes to disambiguate). If I saw that in a Word document, however, I would have thought the author was a technically-illiterate person who puts extra spaces around commas, quotes, parentheses etc. or uses 10 spaces instead of 1 tab for indent…