Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

Post by gowld » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:26 PM UTC

copperx wrote: post #26

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…

I remember reading the TeXbook and learning that the space after a period is wider if there's a capital afterwards and the various ways of suppressing this behavior. So it's a TeX thing, not LaTeX.

Post by riahi » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:29 PM UTC

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?

Post by roelschroeven » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:31 PM UTC

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…

Post by rightbyte » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:44 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #121

johnday wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by itronitron » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:54 PM UTC

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…