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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

#161

Post by gglnx »

jakub_g wrote: post #104

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…

In German this is called Plenken [1] and if you're writing spaces before such double-characters, many people will think that you're not the smartest person. Angry comments under news articles often using this. Something this is called "Deppenleerzeichen" (idiot's space), but this is yet another thing in the German language [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita

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

#162

Post by yellowapple »

brokensegue wrote: post #49
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…

So I think it doesn't quite miss the point. the point is that you want one ASCII space after a period and then you want the layout algorithm to do something intelligent (like make it as wide as two spaces or 1.5 spaces). This is why "1 space" is correct and two spaces conflates different layers of document creation (the textual information to display and how it is laid out).

> This is why "1 space" is correct and two spaces conflates different layers of document creation (the textual information to display and how it is laid out)

The problem is that I know of exactly zero programs other than TeX and the descendants thereof that are able to reliably distinguish between word-spaces and sentence-spaces without being explicitly told to do so (e.g. with double-spaces), and even then.

There are indeed different space characters in Unicode, and if Word wanted to do this right it would autocorrect to, say, or (the way it already does for quotes, much to the chagrin of people including code snippets in Word documents).

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

#163

Post by snarfy »

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…

Thank you for this! I've been complaining for a long time this is why it happened - browsers eat white space.

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

#164

Post by yellowapple »

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.

There are (maybe not explicitly designated as such, but en-space or em-space would be reasonable, I think). The problem is that there's no sane or consistent way to actually input these characters (besides perhaps a macro that detects double-spaces and replaces them with a single somewhat-longer-than-normal space).

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

#165

Post by leddt »

jakub_g wrote: post #104

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…

I'm French Canadian and I usually avoid the space before those characters because they have a tendency to wrap on a new line by themselves. You are supposed to use non breaking spaces but most tools won't do it automatically, and they are not trivial to type.

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

#166

Post by yellowapple »

Zanni wrote: post #64
mydongle wrote: post #52

Where did people learn to double space? I've never had anyone even mention such a thing in school.

Typing classes. That would be typing on an actual typewriter, not "keyboarding" on a computer.

I learned to touch-type on a computer, and still learned to use two spaces.

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

#167

Post by MattBlissett »

dependenttypes wrote: post #29
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…

I really wish that there were spell checkers that offered en-GB-oxendict.

GNU Aspell has an en_GB-ize-w_accents dictionary, which I think is what's needed. The source seems to be here: http://wordlist.aspell.net/

It's the UN's official version of English [1], and my employer's, and it's widely used in scientific publications.

I'd like to use it in Firefox, but the British dictionary extension[2] accepts both versions. I have "feces colored airplane modeling" marked as misspellings, and "digitized aeroplane signalling" accepted, but "digitised" is also accepted by this dictionary.

[1] http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/ed-guidelines/style/spel...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/british-engli...

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

#168

Post by oilrefinery »

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…

Why couldn't the browser just render the same number of spaces that were in the HTML code? If the code had 1 space then render 1 space on the page, likewise for 2 spaces.

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

#170

Post by yellowapple »

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.

> Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

It would be a lot less hard if we were able to unambiguously tell the computer whether a period ends a sentence. I wonder how we could possibly do that...

(Less sarcastically: a lot of Unix programs - Emacs, vim, troff, etc. - solve this problem by defaulting to double-spaced sentences, thus resolving the ambiguity. Kinda odd that this ain't the Tex approach; there's already precedent by using doubled-up ``backquotes'' and ``single quotes'' to produce “smart double quotes”, and lone `backquotes' and `single quotes' similarly become ‘smart single quotes’.)

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