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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

#121

Post by MereInterest »

johnday wrote: post #120
jrockway wrote: post #114

One thing that's nice about being a programmer is that I haven't thought about any mechanics of text formatting for many years. When I save a file, it just gets reformatted according to rules that were set up exactly once. I have no idea whether or not I use spaces or tabs, or whether there are semicolons at the end of lines, or whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {". It makes me sad that the least technical users ha…

> I have no idea [...] whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {". You never read your own code?

Format to personal style on open. Format to project style on save. The project style is then consistent, but irrelevant.

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

#122

Post by rgoulter »

"If you’re still [wanting to use double-spaces], you will be able to ignore the suggestion. The Editor feature in Word allows users to ignore the suggestion once, make the change to one space, or turn off the writing-style suggestion."

On the one hand, it's reasonable to assume that it would be a configurable option.

On the other hand, I feel like having a title like that doesn't suggest it's an option/configuration. ("Word now flags double spaces after a period as an error" makes it sound like it's an error to use double spaces after a period).

"What should the default configuration be?" is an entirely different question to the flamebait "which one is correct, single or double" (especially given that there seem to be a number of established uses of both).

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

#123

Post by viraptor »

prmph wrote: post #115
smitty1e wrote: post #101

I try to explain to people that punctuation like "'" and "." is overloaded, and the real point of the second space is to disambiuguate. 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.

Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand

Especially the overloaded ".". Apart from usage as a decimal point and elipsis, where it's obvious, what are the overloaded cases?

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

#124

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

So that's why that happened.

Typographically, I don't think you can compare the visual effect of an extra period in properly rendered right-justified text with the effect when it's buried in the usual ragged-right default on the web.

In the early 90s most monitors didn't have the resolution to handle full justification without making it look like crap.

In theory it would have been helpful if there had been enough foresight to consider the situtation >20 years later. Because those neat margins look really nice.

In practice full justification would have used significantly more memory and processor power and would have been much slower. So although it's a shame we ended up with ragged right as the default, it's only become practical to consider high quality implementations - not just budget hacks - of more polished formatting in the last few years or so.

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

#125

Post by ghaff »

evgen wrote: post #102
jefftk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Similar to the spacing convention, we use two hyphens to signify an en dash and three for an em dash.

Three hyphens is a lot. I would have said it was more common to just use one hyphen for what should properly be an en-dash (which most people don't use) and two hyphens for an em-dash with or without spaces to separate from the surrounding words.

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

#126

Post by jimhefferon »

viraptor wrote: post #123
prmph wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand

Especially the overloaded ".". Apart from usage as a decimal point and elipsis, where it's obvious, what are the overloaded cases?

etc.

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

#127

Post by gowld »

ascorbic wrote: post #19
dubya wrote: post #5

It 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.

There needs to be a character because a sentence is a grammatical concept not a lexical concept.

Mr. Bean is in one sentence, not two.

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

#128

Post by MereInterest »

prmph wrote: post #115
smitty1e wrote: post #101

I try to explain to people that punctuation like "'" and "." is overloaded, and the real point of the second space is to disambiuguate. 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.

Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand

Is the dot a period at the end of a sentence? In that case, there should be an m-space following the period, and line breaks are allowed after the period. Is the dot an abbreviation of an honorific (e.g. Mr. So-and-so)? In that case, there should only be an n-space, and line breaks between the honorific and the name should be forbidden. Is the dot an abbreviation of a unit (e.g. 3 lb.)? In that case, the period may or may not also indicate the end of a sentence, and should have an m-space or n-space depending on which it is.

While I think the typesetting software should be smart enough to distinguish these cases on its own, like LaTeX does, the parent's point is that the user can add extra information in the form of double spacing to indicate what length of space is appropriate.

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

#129

Post by ghaff »

prmph wrote: post #115
smitty1e wrote: post #101

I try to explain to people that punctuation like "'" and "." is overloaded, and the real point of the second space is to disambiuguate. 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.

Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand

Quotation marks are particularly overloaded (and arguably overused). They can mean:

- A literal quote from somebody

- A way to indicate so-called, a term of art, etc.

- Scare quotes

- Certain titles, e.g. TV episodes

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

#130

Post by gowld »

brandmeyer wrote: post #12
CamperBob2 wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

This is doubly nonsense. TeX works very hard to make good looking spacing. Markdown emits HTML, which has a completely separate rendering engine for spacing. And the only reason HTML looks wrong is that the programmers of rendering engines weren’t as good as Knuth, and van Rossum’s anti-intellectualism lobbied against semantically rich markup for sentences.
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