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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

#261

Post by aembleton »

quicklime wrote: post #148
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…

Being a programmer won't save you from this particular style war. If there's a comment in your code with a sentence that begins with a double space, your code formatter probably won't flag or remove it in the same way that MS Word will. And it's likely shown in a monospace font, which makes it more noticeable. How many spaces do people put after a full stop in comments in their code? I go with one, but Vim's J and gq…

I go for two, but that's only because it is now in my muscle memory to apply two spaces after a full stop. This came about when I was doing a typing certificate in the UK in the late 90s and I've continued to do it ever since.

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

#262

Post by taeric »

Groxx wrote: post #254
taeric wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using markup where they shouldn't be. If, in word, I type italic text using stars, that just means I'm wrong in that context. Similarly, if I use escapes, such that I expect \n to add a new line, I'm just wrong. That doesn't make it less useful where it originated. Edit: I amusingly had to try twice to get the italic text there. Double stars did not bold. I don't know how to escape the stars.

Word has never had markup though. Nor have most people ever written markup. Why would they be trying to write markup?

I would wager most folks that use word have never been the two space crowd. Especially not people that learn on word.

Just like most people that write on paper don't leave extra space after a sentence. We do indent paragraphs commonly. At least, if you are writing somewhere you want it indented, it is incumbent on you to do so. :)

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

#263

Post by robbrown451 »

Theodores wrote: post #118
KMag wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, the first space would be full width, the second would be half width but would also cause the one before it to become half width. You wouldn't really see that there were half width spaces until you edit, but they are there as soon as typed.

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

#264

Post by opo »

insulanian wrote: post #256
opo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any code editors also treat a delete of one of these spaces as removing the tab width size? (I've never seen it, but maybe there are ones that do that.) What tends to happen is that yes, the tab enters the N spaces, but if you have to move code around, you can find yourself deleting a lot of spaces.

I'm using VS Code and it does do that. It deletes back to the previous indentation level. In the case when you move code around you will anyway go for Tab/Shift+Tab in any editor.

You are right, it looks like it tries to do the right thing on indent. Though if you try and use tabs to align anything after an indent it just treats them as spaces.

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

#265

Post by sideshowb »

enriquto wrote: post #258
jakub_g wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine is a physics PhD. Most journals require to use their exact LaTeX settings for every little detail in order to have an article published. Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal.

> Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal. What kind of menial work do you mean? Isn't that just a matter of changing the class of your document? Why would you need to change the text of the article itself?

I'm not GP but some journals have formatting requirements such as specifying which sections (e.g. introduction, background, methods, results, discussion) you must have and in what order. Also relative size of these e.g. how much background is expected? Word/page length limits both for the abstract and complete article. Nit picks like whether you refer to Figure 1 or fig. 1 in the text (and whether it's capitalized if not at sentence start). Usually if you reformat a bibliography to a different referencing style, even automatically, it needs checking as the database fields will have been used in different ways and often errors creep in. Different wording for competing interests and author contributions statements and maybe a different position for the former (in the main manuscript / a separate file). The list goes on...

Not to mention often the latex style (or word template) given often directly contradicts the author instructions page on the website.

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

#266

Post by JadeNB »

mcguire wrote: post #224
svat wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When?

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

#267

Post by JadeNB »

svat wrote: post #233
pxx wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes there should be a \ after “Soc.” Proofreading the typeset output might have caught this error. :-) The “\null” after “NASA” is to show an example where the heuristic fails in the other direction: the “.” after the uppercase letter won't be considered to end the sentence, so you need to either type `\hbox{NASA}.` or `NASA\null.` (where `\null` is an abbreviation for `\hbox{}` i.e. an empty box) or something like t…

I think `\relax` is a better no-op than `\null`, right?

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

#268

Post by JadeNB »

Retric wrote: post #145
bottle2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Double spacing between paragraphs is surprisingly helpful with smudged text on physical paper. Many linguistic conventions seem arbitrary, but are really about redundancy. Punctuation could have replaced spaces.just like capitalization of the first letter in a new sentence,it’s helpful to make things as obvious as possible. Is that period a typo or are those supposed to be different sentences?

It basically did, except the other way around: punctuation was originally used where we would use spaces now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#Western_Antiquity

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

#269

Post by JadeNB »

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?

"..." shouldn't be used for ellipses; the spacing is bad. That's why we have the single "…". (Maybe we need code points for "SENTENCE-ENDING PERIOD" and "NON-SENTENCE-ENDING PERIOD"?)

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

#270

Post by svat »

JadeNB wrote: post #267
svat wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there should be a \ after “Soc.” Proofreading the typeset output might have caught this error. :-) The “\null” after “NASA” is to show an example where the heuristic fails in the other direction: the “.” after the uppercase letter won't be considered to end the sentence, so you need to either type `\hbox{NASA}.` or `NASA\null.` (where `\null` is an abbreviation for `\hbox{}` i.e. an empty box) or something like t…

I think `\relax` is a better no-op than `\null`, right?

While \relax is indeed a no-op “command”, that is precisely why it doesn't affect anything here. The way TeX works is that (roughly speaking), after expanding macros and acting on other commands (primitives) it encounters, it treats every character it encounters as another member of the current horizontal list (paragraph). Then it breaks this list into lines, etc. Whether you insert \relax or not, the horizontal list is the same: the uppercase A will be followed by the period. So you need something like \hbox{} or (equivalently) \null (something that actually gets into the horizontal list) between the “A” and the “.”.
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