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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

#221

Post by JKCalhoun »

rs23296008n1 wrote: post #97

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

Yes, I remember double-spaces between sentences from "Typing" class in Junior High School (you know, before they even offered anything called "Computer Science").

Type-set lead blocks allowed for variable spacing, typewriters were more limited. When I see double-spaces now (in email, for example) I tend to draw conclusions about the sender's age.

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

#222

Post by sideshowb »

enriquto wrote: post #211
sideshowb wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long? Reasons for technical people to use word: 1. A non technical person may need to edit or even just comment on the document at some point 2. It's stupid, but in a lot situations people are conditioned to take an email with the real content attached in a word doc more seriously than a plain email. You could use a PDF to the same effect but see point 1. 3. Actually imo…

> Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long? I don't know about the OP, but in the mathematics community you need to have a lot of confidence on yourself to write a paper in Word. It would be a much worse offense than using comic-sans, and it would likely be interpreted as a flamboyant deviation and unnecessary attention whoring.

Interesting.

I have once written for a journal that insisted on latex but can't say I found it a good way to work (and that's after plenty of experience with it including a phd thesis). I can see how it might be better for math heavy writing, especially 10 years ago, but most of the basic latex math commands work in word now anyway.

If that field frowns on word so much it should just insist on latex for paper submissions to save anyone the embarrassment, but people enjoy being dicks I guess.

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

#223

Post by k1w1 »

ohazi wrote: post #75
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…

Wow, that webhistory mailing list archive is quite the treasure trove...

The very next comment thread is about unreasonable load that web crawlers create. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0001.ht...

Great proposal from Nathan Torkington that search engines be called "Josie and the Pussycats". Somehow Larry and Sergey didn't get that memo.

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

#224

Post by mcguire »

svat wrote: post #189
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…

One of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do: > I think most books don't do this any more [have wider spaces between sentences]. Newspapers certainly don't. It's way too much trouble escaping out all the abbreviations. If you need wider spaces between sentences you also don't want them indiscriminately after every period, so you need to exercise more care and indicate them…

Note: You should use nonbreaking spaces (the ~) in many places where they are often not used.

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

#225

Post by justinclift »

lloeki wrote: post #199
leddt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC alt-space inserts a NBSP utf8 character on macOS and Linux basically anywhere. It’s been too long since I used Windows but I recall something like that working (maybe only in some select software though). Now the visual feedback though... It usually appears as a regular space.

> ... Linux basically anywhere.

Probably not in KDE, as that (by default) has alt-space bring up the Plasma "Search Bar".

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

#226

Post by lostgame »

ken wrote: post #195
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…

While we're on the topic of typographical prejudice, I confess that if I see a Microsoft Word document at all, I tend to assume the author is not so technically literate. The intersection of "people I've seen use Word" and "people who know how to write a program" is extremely small.

Beyond LibreOffice, or the privacy-violating Google Docs, can I legitimately ask what word editing software you would suggest as an alternative?

I’ve never before head of the use of Microsoft Word as anything but professional.

I’m a senior iOS dev, I’ve been in iOS, web development, and more recently AR/VR, I’ve never used anything but, I’ve never been instructed to use anything but, and I’ve also had many a job where it was a requirement.

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

#227

Post by pxx »

svat wrote: post #189
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…

One of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do: > I think most books don't do this any more [have wider spaces between sentences]. Newspapers certainly don't. It's way too much trouble escaping out all the abbreviations. If you need wider spaces between sentences you also don't want them indiscriminately after every period, so you need to exercise more care and indicate them…

Wait, what's the \null for and shouldn't there be a \ after Soc.?

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

#228

Post by rs23296008n1 »

snazz wrote: post #152
slap_shot wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a zero "0". Whoa, never heard that one. Did that have any major traction at some point? What was the point?

Some older typewriters had no 1 or 0 keys: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/t...

The irony was that all the typewriter keyboards we were using had separate keys.

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

#229

Post by domador »

I grew up putting two spaces after a period. A few years ago, after reading an article arguing for one space, I decided to try single spaces, as open-mindedly as possible. However, after a few days I ended up going back to the double space, since the single space just looked plain ugly to me. To me single spaces make all sentences look like run-on sentences, at least visually.

On a different, though my side lost this religious debate, I have higher hopes for the eventual demise of all caps (which always look ugly to me, even in document or section titles.)

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

#230

Post by Groxx »

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…

Another piece of evidence in favor of "the debate rages" (though IMO more in favor of double-spacing): if typographers were even slightly unified in this, you'd see period-double-space ligatures that render as period-single-space.

Instead, I'm not aware of any common fonts that do this.

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