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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

#201

Post by contravariant »

bottle2 wrote: post #140
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why that happened. Typographically, I don't think you can compare the visual effect of an extra period in properly rendered right-justified text with the effect when it's buried in the usual ragged-right default on the web. In the early 90s most monitors didn't have the resolution to handle full justification without making it look like crap. In theory it would have been helpful if there had been enough for…

I don’t know. It sounds like you’re older and smarter than I, but whenever I see two spaces at the end of a sentence, I fix it to make it one space. It looks plain wrong to my brain

Two spaces is probably wrong, but for typesetting it generally looks better to have slightly bigger spaces at the end of sentences, and if you need to stretch space it generally works better to do so at the end of sentences.

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

#203

Post by gonehome »

imustbeevil wrote: post #88
gonehome wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I was forced to do this as a child when writing typed stuff in school and wish I hadn’t, hopefully won’t be too hard to relearn. We were also forced to have perfect MLA citations in high school where the librarian had to sign off on it and you had to go rewrite it for any arbitrary little thing - what a monumental waste of time. They probably still make the students do that.

When I was in school they still had us using MLA but there were sites you could post any URL or book title and it would generate the citation for you. Given the seeming inability of many people to gauge the voracity of primary sources, I'm not so sure the teachers were wrong in this case. I know I liked reading wikipedia and copying the sources from there, but there's something to be said for teaching exactly how unr…

That software didn’t work for us at the time because we had to follow some document provided by the school and what software did exist was often slightly different in the exact placement of punctuation.

I think that focus was a waste - when you really need to do that in graduate school it’s not hard to figure out and you can use software to do it.

They also made us put inline citations in the writing itself (you couldn’t even say the year someone was born without citing the source).

Of course the teachers didn’t actually look at the source and discuss its quality (which may have been useful) - they instead obsessed over minutia of where exactly a space or period is required in the citation and if it’s a periodical or website.

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

#204

Post by sideshowb »

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.

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 it's the best tool for the job it's designed for. Markup/markdown and adobe have their places but not in everyday business writing. Or even scientific, it beats latex for journal papers imo (see point 1).

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

#205

Post by michaelcampbell »

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.

Not sure if you mean if it's convention to put an extra space in the source input or the rendered output, but 'extra space' (as opposed "an extra space character") is definitely rendered in the output.

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

#206

Post by xxpor »

leephillips wrote: post #153
kwhitefoot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in the tradition current when I was growing up neither Mr nor St require a dot because they both include the last letter of the word. The dot is meant to indicate that letters following it have been omitted.

This is a key punctuation difference between North American and UK English. In NA, we use the dot here, but not in the UK. Actually, I’ve started to adopt the UK convention, because I think it looks neater.

Meanwhile, the house style at the NYT is to use periods between each letter of an acronym in certain cases, e.g. W.H.O., D.O.D, and U.N., but not NASA for some reason.

I've had to occasionally append to existing texts that use the period between each letter style, and I have to say, it's incredibly annoying to physically type.

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

#207

Post by michaelcampbell »

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…

Not just French. I see it a lot from other non-native-english speaking cultures.

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

#208

Post by alok-g »

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…

Is it able to determine the end of sentences correctly all the time? If not, there needs to be some means for humans to indicate the same, and typing two spaces is a reasonable one.

I disable even autocapitalization wherever allowed as the systems just don't get it right. Instead of me trying to learn to correct when the system would get it wrong, I rather find it easier to just habitually do it correct by myself.

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

#209

Post by alok-g »

copperx wrote: post #33
sk5t wrote: post #3

Two spaces are the only civilized option, and I hope the world's numerous, two-space-loving lawyers use their now abundant spare time to lay into MSFT about this.

I believe the software should add wide spaces after periods correctly, and not the user. Two reasons: first, two spaces is too big a separation between sentences. Second, it's really hard to maintain consistency (or ensure that there's consistency) in the use of double spacing without the help of software. It's easy to miss when reviewing. Let the software do this menial task. That's what computers are for, aren't th…

As far as the software is able to do this correctly ... it doesn't.

(Other comments already cover the rest that I would have said.) :-)

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