Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by svat » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

jfk13 wrote: post #85

svat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor quibble: having a non-integral “number” of spaces was not a TeX innovation; Knuth was just reproducing standard practice of fine typography. Using variable-width separators (TeX “glue”) is exactly how human typesetters did it for centuries. So it's not quite the right perspective to consider anything “a holdover from the typewriter era”, because that had never been typographical practice in the first place — in…

> with TeX's standard settings, the inter-sentence space has the same natural width as the inter-word space That's not quite accurate; the inter-sentence space does have a slightly larger natural width as well as more stretchability. It's right there in Chapter 12 of The TeXbook: > "Plain TeX puts extra space at the end of a sentence; furthermore, it automatically increases the stretchability (and decreases the shrin…

Oh oops, sorry about that, thanks for the correction — was doing something custom recently, and got myself confused. So just for completeness: at the default settings, for cmr10 (a 10pt font),

• inter-word space has natural width 3.33333pt, stretchability 1.66666, shrinkability 1.11111.

• inter-sentence space has natural width 4.44444pt, stretchability 4.99997, shrinkability 0.37036.

So the net-effect is that, for example:

• for a line set at natural width: inter-word space is 3.33333pt and inter-sentence space is 4.44444pt (so it's 33% larger)

• for a loose line, stretched by ∛2 (badness 200, the maximum without complaining with the default setting of \tolerance): inter-word space is 5.43319pt, inter-sentence space is 10.7440pt (so it's 97% larger)

• for a tight line, shrunk by ∛2 (badness 200, the maximum without complaining with the default setting of \tolerance): inter-word space is 1.93342pt, inter-sentence space is 3.97782pt (so it's 106% larger)

So only for very loose or tight lines does the inter-sentence space get close to "two spaces".

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

#182

Post by Gaussian » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

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…

A-ha! Another consequential web outcome decided in Urbana-Champaign. As an engineer and a writer, I have monitored this debate for some time. Editors of mine have usually lobbied for two spaces, while engineers I’ve worked with say, simply and reasonably, browsers reading HTML deprecate the extra space, so why bother? Now we know why. Thank you for the fascinating inside story. The traditionalist in me, however, the part that still enjoys a paper newspaper, will always prefer the luxuriousness of the double space.

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

#183

Post by saagarjha » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

insulanian wrote: post #94

PunksATawnyFill wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re faster to use. They’re consistent between fonts.

> They’re faster to use. That's not really an argument. Every code editor can be configured to interpret the tab key as desired number of spaces.

Not every editor can do this, and this sounds like a “solution” to a manufactured problem.

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

#184

Post by aliceryhl » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

frank2 wrote: post #157

evgen wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can't recall ever seeing three hyphens used to signify an em dash in a document published on the net. (I added the word "published" to account for the possibility of the existence of a markup language I am unaware of that employs your three-hyphen convention.) I am fastidious enough about usage that I probably would've noticed and remembered. In my experience, its always two hyphens (or space, hyphen, hyphen, space…

LaTeX converts three hyphens into an em-dash.

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

#185

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

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…

This isn't the same kind of text formatting as that though.

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

#186

Post by jfk13 » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #62

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…

This sort of thing long pre-dates spell checkers, as other have pointed out. Here's an older example for you. The word "alright" existed fairly quietly and unobtrusively in the English language for decades, as a formation similar to "altogether" and "always", until Fowler and other authorities got hold of it after World War 1 and demonized it. * http://jdebp.uk./FGA/all-right-variants.html

FWIW, the Oxford English Dictionary lists it as all right; note that it is a distinct entry from an earlier (now obsolete) word alright meaning "exactly, just".

Regarding the spelling, though, it notes:

> The form alright is frequent, although more widespread in non-literary printed sources (e.g. newspapers and journals) than in literary texts. Compare the standard spellings of already (adj. and adv.), altogether (adj., n., and adv.), always (adv). Although these analogues exist, the form is strongly criticized in the vast majority of usage guides, but without cogent reasons.

I suspect that while all right is generally regarded as the more "correct" form, alright will eventually be accepted as a valid alternative in modern usage, though traditionalists will be fighting a rearguard action for some years yet.

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

#187

Post by weinzierl » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 4:00 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…

In TeX or LaTeX the command to turn the extra space after the period on and off is called \frenchspacing. I remember this because the proof reader of my theses asked me why I had so inconsistent spacing between the sentences and told me that I should stick with a single space. I remember that I had little time to figure it out and that I was very happy when I found that the \frenchspacing command would do it.

I don't remember if \frenchspacing means extra space or no extra space though. Also don't remember if it is a TeX or LaTeX command, and therefore if Knuth called the option like that or if it is Lamport's invention.

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

#188

Post by DanielKehoe » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

getlawgdon wrote: post #132

Many technical replies. Hardly any mentions of CMOS or other real authorities.

Yes. It seems many developers will honor coding conventions or Internet RFCs but love to engage in debate about orthography when it suits them, rather than referring to the Chicago Manual of Style or another authority.

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

#189

Post by svat » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

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 differently in the input markup. For example, using two spaces:

    This is a sentence.  This is another.  Dr. Smith wrote in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. about NASA.  It was good.

Or in TeX, which makes the typical case easier by using the heuristic that a period after a lowercase letter ends a sentence, you need to indicate wherever this heuristic fails (you can also use ~ to prevent a line-break):

    This is a sentence. This is another. Dr.~Smith wrote in Proc.\ Amer.\ Math.\ Soc. about NASA\null. It was good.

Having to keep track of which periods are ends of sentences is a bit inconvenient in the general case, which explains why wider inter-sentence spacing was given up first in newspapers, then low-quality mass-publishing, then finally high-quality printing as well (almost). But typographers today (see my other comment) make it seem like this has always been the case and wider spaces was just a quirk from typewriters somehow!

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

#190

Post by cpach » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

f137 wrote: post #178

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…

I'm not sure extra space after a period is a convention in TeX, meaning it is added only when required by aligning text, not after every period.

AFAIK it is indeed a convention in TeX, and LaTeX. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/tags/frenchspacing/info