Microsoft Word Now Flags Double Spaces as Errors, Ending the Great Space Debate (theverge.com) 344
Microsoft has settled the great space debate, and sided with everyone who believes one space after a period is correct, not two. From a report: The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space. Microsoft recently started testing this change with the desktop version of Word, offering suggestions through the Editor capabilities of the app. If you're still (strangely) on the two-spacer side, you will be able to ignore the suggestion. The Editor feature in Word allows users to ignore the suggestion once, make the change to one space, or turn off the writing-style suggestion. We understand Microsoft has been testing the feature change recently and it will roll out to everyone using the desktop version of Word soon. Feedback to the change has been overwhelmingly positive. "As the crux of the great spacing debate, we know this is a stylistic choice that may not be the preference for all writers, which is why we continue to test with users and enable these suggestions to be easily accepted, ignored, or flat out dismissed in Editor," says Kirk Gregersen, partner director of program management at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge.
Only if you let it (Score:5, Informative)
It's still a configurable setting, as it has been. Just the default state has changed.
Re:Only if you let it (Score:5, Insightful)
Headline is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, that's right: nobody did.
Headline isn't accurate. Microsoft didn't "end the great space debate," what they did is offer their opinion on the debate and make that opinion the default in their spell checker.
Re:Headline is wrong (Score:4, Funny)
TheRomansdidn'tputspacesbetweenwordsontheirmonuments,soclearlynospacesarethecorrectway.whetheryoulikeitornot.ItwassettledlongbeforeMicrosoftchangedanydefaults.
Re:Headline is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the best presentation of written text is the one that makes the text the most readable, the most understandable, and the least likely to cause confusion or be ambiguous. So the Oxford Comma is in (it reduces confusion), and so is two spaces after a "." (period character) representing a break between sentences (it makes the break between sentences more clear). Is there a dire shortage of white space such that we need to conserve it at all costs?
I don't even listen to most of what Microsoft has to say about operating systems... I'm not going to uncritically accept their opinion on readability of printed text.
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Yes, there is a dire shortage of white space. If everyone used two spaces after a period that denoted the end of a sentence, then there would be no whitespace left for the twelve inch whitespace borders which Microsoft requires surround each everything.
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It should be configurable in both directions... you should be able to tell it that a single space after a period is an error, two spaces after a period is an error, or turn it off entirely. Otherwise, they are just taking sides.
Almost. That way you can still send out documents that offend people.
What's needed is a setting for how you see a single space on screen and the editor should reduce double spaces to single spaces. That way every reader will see something that pleases them.
(until you print it out or make a PDF, or...)
Re:Only if you let it (Score:5, Informative)
No. You don't want to say a single space after a period is an error, because of abbreviations, e.g. e.g. You only want a double space at the end of a sentence.
Re:Only if you let it (Score:4, Funny)
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Yup, the feature has been around forever, at least since Word 95 when I started using it. All they did was switch the default setting.
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Two spaces is doing it wrong. You are supposed to set the post period spacing in the paragraph formatting options.
Same with double spaced lines etc.
Re: Only if you let it (Score:2)
The ghost of my English teacher is really angry at you right now.
Re: Only if you let it (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thankfully. I can't not do double spacing. It's how I was taught to type. And it looks unnatural for me to have single spaces there -- double spaces are easier for me to read too (which is the general case for people who use double spaces).
Twitter is about the only place I use single spaces, and that's only when my tweet is a couple of characters too long.
Re:Only if you let it (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome to the internet, where HTML ignores consecutive spaces.
I agree with you though, a single space at the end of a sentence just looks wrong, especially with proportional fonts that use narrow spaces. When I was in HS print shop, we typically used an en space between words and an em space at the end of sentences. Typewriters emulated that with two monospace font spaces. Why can't, supposedly WYSIWYG, MS Word use different width spaces automatically?
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Waste of time?
Yes! That's a whole couple seconds of my 40+ years of typing I'll just never get back!
I feel so foolish!
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Damn right. I mean, what's next? Fonts and colours? The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!
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Microsoft deciding anything has never ended any debates, though at times it has unified opposing camps together in their common mistruct of Redmond.
This is why I turn off "features" (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I get a new machine at work I have to go through and turn off all these "features" which interfere with me getting my work done. About the only thing I leave on is spellcheck.
Give me WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS any day over this shitfest.
Re:This is why I turn off "features" (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Word processors of about 15 years ago were faster and more useful.
This is doubly amazing because machines are SO much faster now. They've managed to bog down the code by making it thousands of time slower.
And at the same time they destroyed simplicity to such an extent that you spend all your time fighting to get a format pattern, rather than on the words.
Re: This is why I turn off "features" (Score:3)
Which is why I write in a text editor, and move the text to a word processor only when absolutely necessary.
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Absolutely this. In fact, I find myself more productive even in formatting text by just writing in HTML directly than trying to figure out how to work the baroque table controls or whatever in WordProcessorDuJour(TM). I suspect TeX masters feel the same way, only with more beard.
Re:This is why I turn off "features" (Score:5, Insightful)
WordPerfect also had the show code feature. So you could see exactly why your formatting was fucked up.
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(or been destroyed by the Microsoft monster, I'm not sure which. Probably both. Dammit, the antitrust action should have broken Microsoft up. That would have resulted in Microsoft being the two biggest companies in the world, instead of merely the biggest, but it would have been a better working market which would have been more responsive to their customers.)
Re:This is why I turn off "features" (Score:4, Insightful)
It did not self destruct. A well known "philanthropist" took it round the back of the shed, and shot it through the head.
The real question is why the fuck doesn't LibreOffice implement "reveal codes" the patent must have run out years ago, and it would make their own debugging much easier.
Re:This is why I turn off "features" (Score:4, Informative)
Why WordPerfect lost to Word (Score:3)
[WordPerfect] did not self destruct. A well known "philanthropist" took it round the back of the shed, and shot it through the head.
I have opinions about this. I worked for a short time on the Microsoft Word team right around the time Word ate WordPerfect's lunch, so I had a first-hand view of some of the events. And by the way, I run Linux and LibreOffice and LyX these days, so I'm not some kind of Word fanboy.
In my humble opinion, two things sealed the doom of WordPerfect.
First, everyone including WordP
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WordPerfect also had the show code feature. So you could see exactly why your formatting was fucked up.
I also fondly remember "reveal codes" and the many messes it got me out of, but I always thought it was more of a last-ditch workaround for the less than perfect formatting code of WordPerfect. Modern processors are much better about dealing with formatting, but I definitely missed reveal codes in Word during the Office 95-97 era.
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Modern processors are much better about dealing with formatting,
No, no they're not. Have you not seen the thousand and one memes about inserting a picture near a paragraph and what happens to your formatting when using Word? Or if you want to make one teeny tiny change and you now have half your sentence hanging off a cliff?
I can't tell you how many times I have been editing an existing document and tried to get rid of a bulleted list only to find I can't get the sentence to get left justified with the se
Re:This is why I turn off "features" (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern processors are much better about dealing with formatting,
Sadly they are not better about dealing with this, they just hide it from you so you don't notice.
For example, I was making a grocery list of the common items we buy at the store in the order I would find them going through the store to cut down the time I needed to be there. I started by typing all the items out, then pasting in a unicode character to create the checkbox in front of each item. Obviously I missed a few things and when I went to add new items before or after any of these checkboxes it would assume I wanted to use the Unicode font instead. The only way to add something was to add it in the middle of an existing word, re-type part of the prior item and the new item. So "[] Milk" would become "[] MEggsMilk" and eventually "[] Eggs" and "[] Milk" again. If I tried adding Eggs before Milk, Eggs became some Unicode mess!
Now if I was able to see the formatting codes I might have been able to position myself right after the font change.
I also worked on a BIFF formatter in a previous job and know that word/Excel often keeping formatting for things that have no content. So you will often run across things like: [change font] [bold] [italic] [end italic] [end bold] [end font] with no content in it. Some times word/excel will remove tags like these, but I can't find the rhyme or reason when it does. Yes, I know its just a few bytes but I once spent a whole day tracking down why a php generated pdf file wasn't being recognized only to find that someone had put a newline before the opening php tag in a library file!
So now when the editor has the option to show all characters, I turn that on. At my last job it use to annoy a senior developer that I would remove all the white space and tabs after lines of code when fixing things. He even complained to the head of development who asked him if the white spacing was needed or being used. When he answered no the head of development said, then why have it there in the first place.
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Modern processors are much better about dealing with formatting
That's like saying an AK-47 is much better at shooting yourself in the foot than a musket.
Re:This is why I turn off "features" (Score:5, Insightful)
>"WordPerfect also had the show code feature. So you could see exactly why your formatting was fucked up."
+1000
I used WordPerfect under Unix and Linux for a very, very long time (before there was even a GUI, and many years after there was). It was so much better in so many ways than MS-Word (and thus Open/Libre-Office Writer). There are things I sorely miss. Reveal codes is #1 on that list. I was forced, kicking and screaming, into Open/Libre-Office only because I had no choice (because WordPerfect went "poof" and the old binaries would simply not run on any modern system, anymore).
For for those who would argue that WordPerfect was "backwards" because it was using codes instead of styles, WordPerfect had full support of styles *as* codes. The "MS-Word-Way", with only non-visible styles, leaves the user hunting through tons of menus and settings trying to decypher what is going on with a strange document. And there are lots of very, very badly composed documents out there.
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WordPerfect was a piece of crap that desperately needed a 'show codes' feature because it mangled those codes so often, and had no way to clean them up automatically. It was trivial for a user to delete codes without realizing it (now you have a start code without a matching end code, and all your formatting falls over). You could end up with dozens of the same code stacked on a single paragraph.
Word ate WordPerfect's lunch a. because it offered something approaching WYSIWYG instead of WordPerfect's "guess
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Use paragraph styles. Use them exclusively instead of messing around with the functions for changing the styling of individual paragraphs.
In addition to paragraph styles, lists have their own indent settings (accessible by right-clicking on the bullet/number and selecting 'adjust list indents', iirc).
But if you really want a WYSIWYG editor that works, switch to FrameMaker.
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Microsoft Word has a show code feature, too. It's called "export to HTML". It shows you clearly what word is doing:
* open 43 font tags
* write one word
* close 15 of them
* open 15 of them
* write another word
* close 15 of them again
* bold bold bold italic close italic bold bold italic close italic bold bold
* write a word
* close all the bolds. Also open and close the matching italics, more or less, but throw one in just randomly enough you can't search and replace the string
* close the remaining 28 font tags
*
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Hardware acceleration -- can make slow machines much, much slower, and a host of other issues (e.g. frozen/blank displays on USB display adapters)
Animated type bar -- what complete ass thought a smooth-sliding type bar, or really any animation, was a good idea in a productivity suite? (fortunately, this will also go away if you "turn off unnecessary animations" in Windows accessibi
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WordPerfect 5.1 was actually very efficient for writing. You could do everything with the keyboard. And nobody wasted any time futzing with formatting and fonts because you could see so little of the changes on the screen anyway. You would just sit down and type. Nothing to distract you from getting the job done.
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I use double spaces because that's what comes after a period. It's the appropriate format for a sentence.
My double spaces are not accidental. They're there for a reason.
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Unless you actually don't read your own questions, why would you ask a question with such an obvious answer already stated in the question?
Re:This is why I turn off "features" (Score:5, Interesting)
It's great though that Word is such an amazingly polished product that there's no more work to be done on it except for useless features. Oh wait, I've tried Word recently, it's buggy, slow, incompatible with other versions of itself, and mostly serves as an example of how not to write software. Why are they wasting time on stuff no one wants instead of improving the damn thing? We have supercomputers on our desks these days, so Microsoft apps should be incredibly fast, and yet every release they get slower. Word 95 was fast, but little did we know it was all downhill from that point.
the correct spacing is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be consistent. One or two spaces are fine, but only as long as you are consistent about it.
Who is debating this? Always use 2 spaces after (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Who is debating this? Always use 2 spaces aft (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Who is debating this? Always use 2 spaces aft (Score:5, Informative)
Outside of slashdot, you can get the double space in html with
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I really don't get these markup languages like json that rely on spacing. Seems like trivial bullshit if something is misaligned by a single space.
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Double spaces after periods are an archaic device going back to pre-proportional type. If you're using proportional type, only one space after punctuation is required and is the correct/preferred usage.
Re:Who is debating this? Always use 2 spaces after (Score:5, Informative)
More space after a period is a tradition that goes back centuries. It was developed by typesetters--who used proportional fonts.
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Re:Who is debating this? Always use 2 spaces after (Score:4, Insightful)
A single space with proportional typeface is worse than with a typewriter, as it is usually a narrower space.
Centuries before typewriters, it was common to use wider spaces at the ends of sentences than between words. Double spaces were used with typewriters because they didn't have a choice of using a wider single space. Now if modern "WYSIWYG" word processors would automatically display and print wider spaces at the ends of sentences, I'd be OK with it being a single (wide) space.
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However therea are mutliple correct/preferred usages. By claiming that only one way is the correct way, then you're starting up the war again! For typewriters, the style recommended for over a century has been two spaces.
There is no such thing really as pre-proportional type since the first types were proportional (ie, Gutenberg, wood blocks, etc). Maybe you mean pre-proportional on computers, in which case proportional type goes back to the 70s.
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Spaces are expensive, there's no need to use any more than needed. One is plenty.
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Good afternoon, Mme. Johnson. Dr. Smith will see you now.
Good afternoon, Mme.
Johnson.
Dr.
Smith will see you now.
Double spaces can help delineate between abbreviations and ends of sentences, too. It's kind of a fail in HTML, IMHO...
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The two space convention came about mostly because of typewriters and monospaced fonts*. It wasn't really the standard before then, so clinging to it now doesn't typically make sense.
* https://slate.com/technology/2... [slate.com]
Re:Who is debating this? Always use 2 spaces after (Score:5, Informative)
Henry Beadnell’s influential Guide to Typography, published in London in 1859, advised using an em space after a sentence that ends in a period: “after a full-stop, an em quadrat” (pt. 2, p. 43).
--Chicago Manual of Style [cmosshoptalk.com]
Typesetters used proportional fonts.
If you're going to use history to back up your choice, at least get the history correct.
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"With the onslaught of decent Word Processors and fonts especially with commercial type setting type software (which we were using) the single space after a period was made a little longer than the single space between words. Just enough for readability so you don't need to double space."
Hmmm. I wonder how the word processing software knows how to differentiate between a non-terminal "." (period) used to mark an abbreviation like "Dr." or "Mrs." or "Inc."? It seems to me that a convention of having two "
Comment removed (Score:3)
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This is actually a good idea. But it doesn't follow the state model which is all instant feedback. You're talking about a post-step. Modern word processors don't have such things.
It took me years to break that habit... (Score:2)
Blasphemers (Score:2)
The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space. Microsoft recently started testing this change with the desktop version of Word, offering suggestions through the Editor capabilities of the app. If you're still (strangely) on the two-spacer side, you will be able to ignore the suggestion.
What's next? (note the double space here)Flagging an oxford comma?
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What's next? (note the double space here)Flagging an oxford comma?
Not sure if you're joking, but that is another option just like spaces required between sentences.
"Spaces between sentences" has options for 1, 2, or don't check. They changed the default.
"Comma required before last item" has options for always, never, or don't check. Word still doesn't care, but lets you enforce either way.
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Flagging an oxford comma
The Oxford comma should be flogged, not flagged. It's the only think I disagree with Strunk & White about.
Re:Blasphemers (Score:5, Informative)
Flagging an oxford comma
The Oxford comma should be flogged, not flagged. It's the only think I disagree with Strunk & White about.
Without the Oxford Comma you have ambiguity. Take the same message one mind send in text format, one version with the comma, one without.
Oxford Comma: "Waiting to meet you will be Steve, my dad, and my brother." Clearly 3 people.
No Oxford Comma: "Waiting to meet you will be Steve, my dad and my brother." Implies 1 person (and a really bad case of incest).
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Re:Blasphemers (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you notice I and others call them extra spaces?
That just makes you extra wrong. Two spaces after a period that ends a sentence, one after an abbreviation. In proper typesetting, the inter-sentence spacing isn't quite as large as two inter-word spaces, but it is larger than one. HTML just messed that up, producing less legible text for everyone.
Is the Oxford Comma next? (Score:2)
Next thing you know they'll be flagging the Oxford Comma as an error.
Double Spaces (Score:2, Insightful)
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Two spaces after punctuation is mostly a relic from the typewriter years (see https://slate.com/technology/2... [slate.com]) - it wasn't the standard before, and the purpose for which it was created is no longer needed.
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The use of an em-dash (not "two spaces") goes back to linotype type-setting. After that it became an em-quad after periods (vs. 3-em between words). The use of two spaces on typewriters was to mimic the effect used by typesetters.
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> it wasn't the standard before, and the purpose for which it was created is no longer needed.
There are many things that aren't "needed", but that doesn't make them "errors", necessarily. Some people like the way two spaces look. It's a stylistic choice, and much different from something like a misspelling or grammatical error. I'm personally glad I can turn this behavior off.
I can spare the extra nibble for my second space. ;-)
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It's not a "relic" if it's still actively used. Also, muscle memory is a real thing. I don't think I'm mentally capable of stopping myself from double-spacing after periods. Making changes like this is heavy-handed.
That said - it's such an arbitrary convention that calling one "correct" is disingenuous. You can say one is perhaps predominant, but there is no "correct" about one way or the other.
This is one of those things that is really just a waste of energy - there is no reason for society to argue ab
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Yep. I learned to touch type 50+ years ago -- the summer after I was in sixth grade -- and at the end of a sentence, my right thumb just automatically hammers the space bar twice. Unless I'm writing in a text editor for subsequent formatting, in which case it's automatic to hit return at the end of a sentence.
As an "I'm so old" point, I'm so old that every computer that's mine has been configured to turn caps-lock into a control key. My fingers know ctrl-h for backs
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I have to agree. Granted, I learned to type on a typewriter so I am biased. Reading a single-space paragraph with a mix of abbreviations within a sentence becomes painful— I actually need to put mental energy into de-constructing the paragraph rather than simply scanning for content.
It makes me curious how whippersnappers actually read. They must have learned different “tricks” in school to follow content. But, for my (failing) photographic memory, a double space after a period is huge in
First it was cupholders... (Score:4, Funny)
reverse progress (Score:3)
Yet another reason for me to hate all that MS Word has become. The last acceptable release was v2.0 for Win3.11.
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Not real
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i should've realized my mistake sooner, with all the HTML talk going on in these comments.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's not a bug. You start with 2 paragraphs, each of which has a style applied. These are called "paragraph styles" and as their name implies, they apply to the entire paragraph.
Then you delete the delimiter that separates these paragraphs. Guess what: you now have one paragraph. The only correct way to handle this is to apply one paragraph style.
If you want two parts of a paragraph to have different styles, you should use character styles.
Use LaTex (Score:2)
\frenchspacing
Publishers rejoice, the wicked space is dead (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what happens when products are mature (Score:5, Insightful)
Once a project reaches a certain level of maturity, teams get featuritis, where they start to add pointless features to the detriment of the product. Firefox is at that point. Firefox exists, in part, because Netscape Navigator got to that point too. (Also it needed a rewrite anyway.) I think Thunderbird is there, but that team hasn't added so much bloat as the Firefox team. Another example is the C# language.
But you have a whole team of programmers, right? Who wants to say "Yeah, this product is done now, please fire me and my team."
If MS Word needs changes, they need to go back to the basics to make it productive again. I know everyone who uses it experiences a lot of the same frustrations: Make a numbered list, but the numbers get out of sync. Paste some text from a web page or another document, and spend 15 minutes trying to get the fonts and sizes to match. Bulleted lists where one line is indented differently and it never fixes itself. These kind of constant nuisances are what makes people go back to markup languages some times. (The MS Word team should talk to the OneNote team who has a focus on simplicity and ease.)
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>"Once a project reaches a certain level of maturity, teams get featuritis, where they start to add pointless features to the detriment of the product. Firefox is at that point. "
And the Chrome/Android/Google way is to take features and controls and HIDE THEM ALL so it is impossible to find anything or remove control and preferences completely. "Clean" and "simple" to the point of being frustrating and time-wasting. This mentality has infected Gnome and MS-Windows, too. A perfect example, also, is the
Should be handled automatically (Score:5, Insightful)
Two spaces between sentences made sense in the days of mechanical typewriters, but now with computerized text layout, it's an implementation detail that the user shouldn't worry about. Two full spaces is a little too much anyway; it ought to be more like 1.5 spaces.
Just like they automatically insert smart quotes when you type an ASCII quote on the keyboard, they should automatically substitute an "enspace" or similar fat space after periods. (Or maybe not even change the character in the file; just format the output a little bit wider.)
They shouldn't have bothered the user about this at all. If there's either one or two ASCII spaces after a period, display the same thing I just described, and don't flag either choice as wrong. Over time, the people who remember typewriters will die off and the problem will eventually go away.
Re:Should be handled automatically (Score:5, Interesting)
Two spaces between sentences made sense in the days of mechanical typewriters, but now with computerized text layout, it's an implementation detail that the user shouldn't worry about. Two full spaces is a little too much anyway; it ought to be more like 1.5 spaces.
Just like they automatically insert smart quotes when you type an ASCII quote on the keyboard, they should automatically substitute an "enspace" or similar fat space after periods. (Or maybe not even change the character in the file; just format the output a little bit wider.)
They shouldn't have bothered the user about this at all. If there's either one or two ASCII spaces after a period, display the same thing I just described, and don't flag either choice as wrong. Over time, the people who remember typewriters will die off and the problem will eventually go away.
And what if I want to call you Dr. Waffle Iron? How do you know that I am abbreviating doctor instead of ending the sentence? Sure one can infer that I was continuing the sentence based on other punctuation marks but why should the reader need to finish the sentence before they know what I meant? You single space after an abbreviation and you double space after the end of a sentence. It still makes sense.
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Word processors already have grammar checkers parsing the text. In the vast majority of cases, they can apply the appropriate spacing adjustments depending on the situation.
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But grammar checkers are still wrong sometimes, which is why very few (none?) of them are auto-corrected. If MS wanted to make this semi-automated they could have created an auto-correct to substitute two spaces after an end-of-sentence punctuation character with a Unicode em-space similar to how it substitutes two hyphens with a dash. Then add a grammar rule to complain if you only have a normal space at what appears to be the end of a sentence, or if you have a em-space in what appears to be the middle of
My copy of Word has been doing this for a decade (Score:3)
This isn't new. My 2010 version of word has long had a setting that had it flag double spaces as an error, and I have had that option ticked.
So, I guess now this is the default? I honestly thought it already was the default, but I guess this is a slow news day.
I don't get it (Score:2)
I had to (Score:2)
All I know is that, in High School if I'd ever turned in a typed paper with only single-spaces after periods, I would have been docked points.