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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

#111

Post by kd5bjo »

brokensegue wrote: post #55
jlokier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think two spaces makes more sense as an input mechanism, although the ship has sailed so it's no longer possible. That way the document generator can tell the difference between periods that are inside sentences, and those which end sentences. When using one space everywhere in the input, the document generator has to guess, and will sometimes guess wrong. That's why HTML doesn't, and can't, do that kind of intelli…

I mean arguably then we would want a totally different character for end of sentence and not two spaces in a row. I think modern tools are smart enough to properly space "Mr. Foo" v."I was sad. John was happy." and if not you can always manually fix the spacing edge cases yourself without modifying the text.

When I’m writing HTML or TeX, my practice is to use a carriage return after sentences. That makes it easier to reorder them when I do a revision pass.

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

#112

Post by ginko »

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 remember the two space rule driving me crazy when I used GNU typing tutor for learning touch typing. I ended up modifying the tutorial files to get rid of them.

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

#113

Post by bm3719 »

jlokier wrote: post #60

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...

(setq sentence-end-double-space t)

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

#114

Post by jrockway »

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 have to use the most primitive software tooling. Something that programmers never think about (because they are best equipped to program their own programming tools) is apparently something that results in national studies and extremely snide articles because nobody will make good tools for them that end the problem once and for all.

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

#115

Post by prmph »

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

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

#116

Post by tasogare »

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…

First time I hear of it too, and that could explain how the "dot shortcut" (two spaces transforms into a dot followed by space) made it into the iPhone.

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

#117

Post by Theodores »

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 only just worked out that the two spaces I see in text that I format must invariably come from Word docs exported as text. I am from the eight bit era so I intuitively save bytes where I can.

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

#118

Post by Theodores »

KMag wrote: post #95
ferzul wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Excellent suggestion. How could I have forgotten about half-width spaces?

This would only work when editing, not when typing it out the first time.

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

#119

Post by ycombinete »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #21
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 don't think that's right, or at least maybe not for the colonies. I grew up in New Zealand and my mother was very insistent that I spelled and spoke "Proper English", rather than American English. This was before Microsoft Word was popular and the source of truth for the English language, especially for my tech-illiterate mother. She also didn't like me using slang, especially the Kiwi tendency to say "sweet as" an…

I can confirm that South African education was the same as well, before word processors.

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

#120

Post by johnday »

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?

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