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Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

302 points by blondin 7y ago

montroser 7y ago
How self-righteous are The Verge's writings about this...
sk5t 7y ago
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.
- copperx 7y ago
  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 they?
  - jlokier 7y ago
    A wide space after a period is only sensible when the period ends a sentence.
    - rjknight 7y ago
      It would seem sensible to me that a word processor should treat a double-space as a hint that the preceding period ended a sentence, and a single-space as a (weaker) hint that it did not.
  - alok-g 7y ago
    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.) :-)
- downerending 7y ago
  Agree. If this prohibition really takes hold, I will start limiting all of my paragraphs to one sentence. Who's with me?
pedrocx486 7y ago
This reminds me of the Tabs vs Space discussion, and how once Bill Gates did an AMA on Reddit and his answer was that tabs was better because of consistency.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Consistency with what, all the other code that uses tabs?
  - citrin_ru 7y ago
    In code which uses tabs one logical indentation level is always one tab. You can show tab with different width in you editor, but the source code is consistent. If spaces are used you never know how many spaces is one logical level. There is no agreement - some people prefer 2 spaces, some 4 and may be somebody uses 8 or 6. Even worse - I sometimes see when in a single source file some parts use 2 spaces for one logical indent and some - 4 spaces.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  They’re faster to use. They’re consistent between fonts.
  - insulanian 7y ago
    > 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.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Not every editor can do this, and this sounds like a “solution” to a manufactured problem.
    - opo 7y ago
      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.
dubya 7y ago
It seems slightly odd, given that there are different traditions of between-sentence spacing, that there doesn't seem to be a Unicode character for the kind of space between sentences.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Time to give RS a new purpose in life.
- ascorbic 7y ago
  As with all letter spacing, the size is determined by the font metrics. There doesn't need to be a special character for it.
  - thefifthsetpin 7y ago
    Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below? Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.
    - chispamed 7y ago
      Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert “fi” into a character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so there’s definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Are fonts Turing-complete now? I have a feeling they'll become such if not already there; a little programs, complete with configuration switches so that you can control if and how a combination of characters get converted into a ligature depending on surrounding context.
        eperdew 7y ago
        TrueType font hinting actually is Turing complete. A font may contain programs that run on a VM that has functions, variables, unbounded loops, etc.
redwall_hp 7y ago
Good. The only reason that habit is a thing is because of typewriters, which are monospaced. Some people just cargo culted the practice long past its expiration date...which makes for awkward spacing.
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  The practice originally came from typesetting. If anything, it's more relevant and appropriate now than it was in the days when your font choices were limited to 12-point Pica and Elite.
  - brandmeyer 7y ago
    Programs that do typesetting for you (Markdown, LaTeX), will ignore the number of spaces after the period in your "source" code and lay it out in the output with a single space. I've gotten in the habit of single-space in variable-width fonts, and double-space in fixed-width fonts.
    - gorgoiler 7y ago
      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 the source as another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard extension.)
      - copperx 7y ago
        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.
        7y ago
amanzi 7y ago
Great! No more having to find/replace all the double-spacing in documents I review.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I came to say I know a couple of people that edit and format documents for a living and they hate getting documents with double spaces.
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    Why?
    - sosborn 7y ago
      Because it is usually incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Because whether or not it is "correct" in some meta-sense, it probably isn't the style used by whatever organization they're doing the editing for. Organizations tend to have style guides for external documents. (And may go off different style guides/rules for different purposes.)
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      Because double spaces mess up their formatting tools. So they need to purge them always. If they miss one sometimes it means they need to go back, remove the errant double space and start over. Bonus getting a proof back and the customer put the double spaces back in. Source: Way way too OCD for me ex-gf.
- verytrivial 7y ago
  Please don't do that.
robbrown451 7y ago
That's pretty obnoxious. I do two spaces out of habit, and would prefer it just removed them quietly rather than forcing me to relearn. (which is what HTML does, effectively.... it displays it the same if you use two spaces)
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  It's a setting in the grammar checker that has always been there. Just disable it again.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  - copperx 7y ago
    It's easy to forget that computers exist to serve humans, and not the other way around.
- fossuser 7y ago
  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.
  - imustbeevil 7y ago
    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 unreliable a source is based on the inability to properly cite it.
    - 7y ago
basicallydan 7y ago
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 categorised one spelling as British and categorized the other as American, and it created a whole new hobby for many British people who fancied themselves the guardians of the English language, courageously pointing out whenever someone used the filthy, “dumbed down” version from across the Atlantic. We have these brave volunteers to thank for defending the purity of the famously consistent English language, and for these people we have spell checkers to thank. Thanks a lot, spell checkers!
- toomanybeersies 7y ago
  I don't think that's right, or at least maybe not for the colonies. I grew up in New Zealand and my mother was very insistent that I spelled and spoke "Proper English", rather than American English. This was before Microsoft Word was popular and the source of truth for the English language, especially for my tech-illiterate mother. She also didn't like me using slang, especially the Kiwi tendency to say "sweet as" and put "aye" on the end of sentences. Maybe it's a colonial hangover, trying to hold on to the British identity, or maybe it's because she had a less privileged upbringing and saw "Proper English" as a sign of higher status.
  - docdeek 7y ago
    My experience in Australia was similar: always the ’s’ for Australian/British English, with the ‘z’ for American English. Well before spellcheckers, save for the teacher or parent who would spell-check your work and catch every organization and specialized, and correct your alphabet song to finish with ‘zed’ and never ‘zee’. :)
  - kjcharles 7y ago
    I think it is a colonial hangover. It's the same in former British colonies in the Caribbean. We're thought "Proper English" in school and the American spellings are considered wrong. Local dialects are frowned upon in professional settings and writing.
avalys 7y ago
Argh! It’s not my fault, I was brainwashed as a child. I try to keep it down to just one space but I can’t help myself. I’m the victim here!
- andrew_xor_andy 7y ago
  You did a great job in that comment, though :)
  - 3131s 7y ago
    It's just how HTML is rendered, you'll never know whether OP used 1 or 2 spaces in that comment.
    - shpx 7y ago
      If you look at the comment through the Hacker News API, there's two spaces before the last sentence. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?pri... Although, the documentation says that field is HTML, so I'm not sure what to think. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
      - rbinv 7y ago
        Same in the HTML markup.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- copperx 7y ago
  Do you also press space twice after a period in Java-ish languages?
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Personally, in comments I do that yes. I think the end of sentence space looks much better with two than one in monospace font, but I'm not especially bothered either way. When there is one space, it looks more like an abbreviation. I'm mindful that if I do that in shared code, some people will decide I'm incompetent, old or something worse (instead of reading the actual code; people can be petty), so I'll modify my writing style to please others. This HN comment has double spaces after the end of a sentence. Not that you can see it. I think it's a shame HTML ruined the possibility of typographically pleasing sentence spacing that looks distinct from abbreviations. Way back, I used to add wider end of sentence spaces in HTML when running it through generators (like Markdown to HTML).
rmason 7y ago
People have strong opinions on either side of this issue. I grew up with two spaces so anything else doesn't look correct. I did however get past indented spacing on paragraphs pretty quickly and that's mostly gone away. Thankfully book publishers still use them so they're not going away any time soon. Sure hope that Word has a way of toggling it off.
- Angostura 7y ago
  As far as I’m aware book publishers ask authors who are using word processors to use a single space.
svat 7y ago
See https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracliteanriver.com:80/?p=324 https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracl... for a great article on the history of wider spaces between sentences — how there were two traditions of typography and things started to shift towards equal spaces in the 1930s–1960s (i.e. inter-sentence space being the same as the inter-word space). I'm even holding on my lap right now a book published in 1957 by a reputed publisher (Parkinson's Law — Riverside Press / Houghton Mifflin, 24th printing) that uses wider spaces between sentences. As do of course all of Knuth's books (e.g. TAOCP Volume 4A from 2011). For some reason, the other typographical tradition (which I suspect owes its ascendancy to William Morris in some way) is dominant today (which is fine), but the way they've nearly completely rewritten history (e.g. blaming “double” spaces on typewriters) is mystifying. The current version of the relevant Wikipedia article is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_sentence_spacing&oldid=952211622 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_senten...
- kqr 7y ago
  I don't strictly oppose this typographical tradition; my native tongue has many widths of spaces (in particular between a measurement and the unit there should be a slightly narrower space) and I'm used to it. What I dislike strongly is this idea that one should alter the source manuscript to emulate these typographical conventions. It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. They are in no way equivalent!
  - jefftk 7y ago
    > It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. Using a double space is a simple way of telling the computer that you want a wider space, because otherwise it can't tell that you mean the end of a sentence.
    - evgen 7y ago
      Similar to the spacing convention, we use two hyphens to signify an en dash and three for an em dash.
tunesmith 7y ago
I used to be in favor of double-spacing but then learned it was because of monospaced fonts. So now I only do it when my output is in monospaced fonts.
bdcravens 7y ago
Having learned to type on a typewriter in the early 90s (yet another way to date myself) for a long time I used two spaces in word processing and emails etc, and then switched to one as it seemed the popular convention. At some point my brain made the switch to what it considers "normal". It's been so long, I can't remember when that happened.
daxfohl 7y ago
Strange, I learned double spacing in school in 1991 and have somehow gone my whole life until today without knowing or noticing that single spacing was even a thing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
peterkelly 7y ago
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 sentences is given a higher weighting than between words. So you end up with sentences being separated from each other by more whitespace than words. The exact amount will vary, as the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm [1] tries to find the most aesthetically pleasing set of places to break lines. Arguing for one space or two spaces misses the point. [1] http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf
- brokensegue 7y ago
  So I think it doesn't quite miss the point. the point is that you want one ASCII space after a period and then you want the layout algorithm to do something intelligent (like make it as wide as two spaces or 1.5 spaces). This is why "1 space" is correct and two spaces conflates different layers of document creation (the textual information to display and how it is laid out).
  - jlokier 7y ago
    I think two spaces makes more sense as an input mechanism, although the ship has sailed so it's no longer possible. That way the document generator can tell the difference between periods that are inside sentences, and those which end sentences. When using one space everywhere in the input, the document generator has to guess, and will sometimes guess wrong. That's why HTML doesn't, and can't, do that kind of intelligent layout. End of sentence wide spaces in the middle of sentences looks awful.
    - brokensegue 7y ago
      I mean arguably then we would want a totally different character for end of sentence and not two spaces in a row. I think modern tools are smart enough to properly space "Mr. Foo" v."I was sad. John was happy." and if not you can always manually fix the spacing edge cases yourself without modifying the text.
mydongle 7y ago
Where did people learn to double space? I've never had anyone even mention such a thing in school.
- Zanni 7y ago
  Typing classes. That would be typing on an actual typewriter, not "keyboarding" on a computer.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    I was taught double spacing when learning how to write. The teachers specifically mentioned to write using an extra space between sentences.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    I learned to touch-type on a computer, and still learned to use two spaces.
jlokier 7y ago
I found these two thoughtful Wikipedia articles give an interesting background. I didn't know Vi and Emacs used to recognise double spacing as an end-of-sentence navigation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_me...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's still a configurable in Emacs. In particular, it's controlled by the sentence-end-double-space variable, which on my Emacs (27, built a little over a year ago) was still set to true by default, i.e. considering sentences to be separated by double spaces. I have a line in my config that disables this, as I'm used to the single-space tradition.
- ferzul 7y ago
  in vim if you run gqip to reflow a paragraph (or gq generally to reflow some area based on a motion), if the old layout has a fullstop at the end of a line, the new layout will have a double space after it
- bm3719 7y ago
  (setq sentence-end-double-space t)
DanielKehoe 7y ago
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 time) weighed in on the whitespace issue and complained “it’s mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this.” We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh? [1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...
- ohazi 7y ago
  Wow, that webhistory mailing list archive is quite the treasure trove...
  - DanielKehoe 7y ago
    I got to thinking more about this and posted an essay to my blog [1]. Looking back, I wonder if browser developers could have applied the algorithms that Tex uses and perhaps web pages would look slightly more elegant. We take for granted the world around us. Web browsers work a certain way; web pages display the same space between sentences as between words. We forget that many things we take for granted are the product of a social process (or “social practice” as Mao Tse-tung famously said). In this case, something you probably took for granted (and probably never even thought about), was the product of a brief discussion in the summer of 1993 among developers who each had their own beliefs about what was right and good. Reading the archives of the www-talk mailing list reveals how part of our world came to be. [1] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-the-web-1993/ https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-t...
  - k1w1 7y ago
    The very next comment thread is about unreasonable load that web crawlers create. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0001.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0001.ht... Great proposal from Nathan Torkington that search engines be called "Josie and the Pussycats". Somehow Larry and Sergey didn't get that memo.
throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
This kind of deliberate but trivial breakage can't be an accident, and there's enought precedent ("let's screw with the VS/office interface today shall we"). So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else. But I don't believe that 'correcting' a typographical convention is what this is directly about.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else. In larger teams and companies, changes move pretty slow through the design-development-QA pipeline. Maybe this change was made a year ago, and worked its way through the pipes only now?
  - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
    What has this to do with my suggestion?
rs23296008n1 7y ago
I remember a typing teacher being very serious about two spaces after the dot[1]. He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a zero "0". Fortunately both of these rules are now firmly in the past along with witch burning. This is progress. [1] yeah, I could call it a period or a full stop. But its also a dot. Variety is the spice of life as is properly finishing your
- willis936 7y ago
  Unsubstantiated false equivalence.
- slap_shot 7y ago
  > He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a zero "0". Whoa, never heard that one. Did that have any major traction at some point? What was the point?
  - snazz 7y ago
    Some older typewriters had no 1 or 0 keys: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/this_typewriter_has_no_1_or_0_keys_people_used_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/t...
    - rs23296008n1 7y ago
      The irony was that all the typewriter keyboards we were using had separate keys.
  - milliondollar 7y ago
    Can confirm. Also learned that in 1988 in my typing class. Also learned lower case l instead of a 1. It was for typing speed so you didn't have to reach for the top row.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    Features of the typewriter I used in the 1970s as a kid (which was old even then): (1) Did not have a "0" key. Use capital letter "O". (2) Did not have a "1" key. Use lowercase letter "l". (3) Did not have a "!" key. Type ".", then backspace, then type "'". The typeface was designed to make this work well. The "l" looked close enough to a "1". The dimensions of "." and "'" were such that they fit together, and "'" did not have any curve to it that would look out of place on an exclamation mark. Here's a photo of the exact same model: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/wUcAAOSwmftc8s45/s-l1600.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/wUcAAOSwmftc8s45/s-l1600.jpg Other features, while I'm at it: (4) Had a cent sign in addition to dollar sign. This was nice because the symbol was used a lot in real life. (5) Had a key to type 1/4 and 1/2. (6) No backslash, of course. Which explains why old people mix this up so often. They aren't accustomed to there being two different ones they need to keep straight. (7) That LOCK key above SHIFT physically locks the SHIFT key in the down position. I'm not sure what you'd call the mechanism, but it's something like a pawl. SHIFT would normally spring back up, but this blocks it from doing that. You push SHIFT down further to release it. (8) You can load the typewriter with a ribbon that has red and black ink. (You can see red in the photo above.) There's a lever toward the right that controls this. (9) There is no enter or carriage return key, of course. The whole carriage (top part that holds the paper) moves side to side as you type. The power comes from being spring loaded. When you want a new line, you grab that shiny lever at the top left and yank the whole carriage to the right. So you are returning the carriage to the start of the line. (10) Note the TAB SET, TAB CLEAR, and TABULAR buttons. These work like a tab key on computer. You move to some column, push TAB SET, and it remembers that position mechanically. When you hit TABULAR, it moves to that position. Since the carriage is spring-loaded, this is quite lively. The carriage is metal and heavy (a few pounds?), and when you press TABULAR, it gets moving pretty good, and it slams pretty hard into the tab stop. (11) The platen is the roller that the paper wraps around. You can see a knob on the left and the right that can be used to turn the platen. It turns in steps corresponding to the height of one line. But the button centered in the left knob lets you release that and turn it continuously. So it's kind of an snap to grid function that you can turn off and on. You can use this for typing superscripts and subscripts or other weird effects.
seemslegit 7y ago
So war then.
smitty1e 7y ago
I try to explain to people that punctuation like "'" and "." is overloaded, and the real point of the second space is to disambiuguate. They just don't get it, and perhaps won't understand the problem until it kicks them in the shin. The appropriate counterattack might be to introduce some coding and just show how gnarly sentences are to process as a result.
- prmph 7y ago
  Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Especially the overloaded ".". Apart from usage as a decimal point and elipsis, where it's obvious, what are the overloaded cases?
    - jimhefferon 7y ago
      etc.
    - riahi 7y ago
      Abbreviations in the middle of a sentence (When he was talking with Mr. St. Cyr, he saw a bird. Then...”)
      - kwhitefoot 7y ago
        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.
        leephillips 7y ago
        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.
jakub_g 7y ago
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 indentation. --- Talking typography trivia: in French language, it's mandatory to put a space before "double-characters" like : ; ? ! - the side effect is that it often allows to easily recognize a French person online even if they write in English. Most people: Hello! How are you? French people : Hello ! How are you ?
- 205guy 7y ago
  I think you mean « French people : ... » I find the extra space much more common with the colon than with exclamation or question marks.
  - jakub_g 7y ago
    Ha, you got me - I was in non-French thinking mode until the colon - edited :)
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  A lot of French people are aware of the difference when they write in English though.
- ginko 7y ago
  I remember the two space rule driving me crazy when I used GNU typing tutor for learning touch typing. I ended up modifying the tutorial files to get rid of them.
- tasogare 7y ago
  First time I hear of it too, and that could explain how the "dot shortcut" (two spaces transforms into a dot followed by space) made it into the iPhone.
- Theodores 7y ago
jrockway 7y ago
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 have to use the most primitive software tooling. Something that programmers never think about (because they are best equipped to program their own programming tools) is apparently something that results in national studies and extremely snide articles because nobody will make good tools for them that end the problem once and for all.
- johnday 7y ago
  > I have no idea [...] whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {". You never read your own code?
  - MereInterest 7y ago
    Format to personal style on open. Format to project style on save. The project style is then consistent, but irrelevant.
    - rightbyte 7y ago
      I have tried this but the formater in Eclipse messes up too many edgecases or nicely column aligned struct definitions to make it work for me.
    - AgentOrange1234 7y ago
      This sounds good and might work for programmers who are working in well-established languages with mature tooling. For me, I’m opening so many kinds of text files, I’d need a parade of parsers and pretty-printers to pull it off. I can’t see it being a realistic option in the near term.
      - bottle2 7y ago
rgoulter 7y ago
"If you’re still [wanting to use double-spaces], 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." On the one hand, it's reasonable to assume that it would be a configurable option. On the other hand, I feel like having a title like that doesn't suggest it's an option/configuration. ("Word now flags double spaces after a period as an error" makes it sound like it's an error to use double spaces after a period). "What should the default configuration be?" is an entirely different question to the flamebait "which one is correct, single or double" (especially given that there seem to be a number of established uses of both).
getlawgdon 7y ago
Many technical replies. Hardly any mentions of CMOS or other real authorities.
- DanielKehoe 7y ago
  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.
Jemm 7y ago
Double spaces are considerably more readable, especially for those of us with visual impairments.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jasoneckert 7y ago
I prefer a single space myself. However, my copyeditor recently told me that, in order to promote distancing, MLA is going back to two spaces after a period for the remainder of this year...
yellowapple 7y ago
Well then I guess that's another reason I won't use Word (sure you can turn it off, and it's a minor annoyance at most, but still). You one-spacers will have to pry my double-spaced sentences from my cold dead fingers. It's been scientifically proven to be at least marginally superior¹ (no matter how badly The Verge wants to try to convince anyone otherwise), it's substantially less ugly than using a single space, and it's easier for machines to parse (a period followed by two spaces or a line break is unambiguously the end of a sentence, whereas a period followed by a single space is - unless the two-space rule is in effect - ambiguous). This is one substantial reason why, to me, no website will ever be quite as readable as a PDF (let alone print). At least a PDF-outputting typesetter (e.g. LaTeX) can intelligently account for this and add the additional spacing, and it looks fantastic and is delightfully readable when combined with properly-justified text (also a rarity in websites - and Word documents, for that matter). But with HTML, I can't even emulate it with double-spaces; browsers boneheadedly replace even the double-spaces with single spaces. I certainly don't buy the "saving time" aspect, either: Ifwereallycaredaboutsavingtime,thenwhybotherwithspacesatall?Imaginehowmanykeyswecouldfitintoakeyboardifwegotridofthespacebarentirely!Nottomentionhowmanybyteswe'dsaveineverytextfile. (More seriously, unless you really really suck at typing, one v. two spaces should be entirely insignificant in terms of time spent) (EDIT: and I'm only half-joking about that suggestion; there are plenty of examples of people who don't use any spaces at all after sentence-terminating punctuation, so the aforementioned example is just taking things to their logical conclusion) ---- ¹: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6 (The Verge mentioned this in the article, irrationally downplaying its significance)
verytrivial 7y ago
I stopped using Word when I need section numbering that wasn't completely broken. I am therefore not massively surprised they've left that broken for 20 years and decided instead to take sides in a white-space religious war. You know, to "help users."
matiasz 7y ago
https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences.html https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences....
RaceWon 7y ago
The only thing more annoying is my car locks itself if I don't open the drivers side door. So basically when you unlock your car; open a rear door to retrieve some items, dropping your keys on the rear seat to free up both hands, and then shut the door because (A) it's raining, or (B) it's blocking your path or (C) any other reason--you will be locked out, and good and truly fucked. It's pure genius! The only feature I enjoyed more, was the time the computer slammed on the brakes (for no real) reason while I was merging (my fault because I did neglect to shut off that idiotic automatic brake feature). There is however, no way to disable the automatic door locking feature. That reminds me--I need to tape a brick inside of one of the wheel wells so I can smash open one of the windows, so I don't freeze to death some snowy winter night.
wasdfff 7y ago
This ruined me when I first tried to use gtypist. Couldn’t easily see the double space and got like every line wrong the first go around.
progval 7y ago
> Microsoft has settled the great space debate No, Microsoft doesn't get to "settle" a language issue. This also reminds me that some (many?) French speaker believe upper-case accentuated letters (eg. É È À) are incorrect, just because it's impossible to type them on Windows (unless you know the right alt code, but most people don't) and typewriters.
WolfOliver 7y ago
I was so annoyed reading text with two spaces after each other that I've built a writing application [1] that just does not allow to insert two spaces or newlines. [1] https://monsterwriter.app https://monsterwriter.app
jccalhoun 7y ago
As Jebus intended. Now if we can just enact the death penalty for people who don't use the Oxford comma!
hyko 7y ago
An historic day. Here’s Bill Hill advocating a single space after the period back in the early 2000’s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY
alok-g 7y ago
If I as an author disable the check and continue to use double spaces, would it stop flagging on my machine only, or on the readers' machines too? If only on my machine, then the option to stop the flagging would do no good to me and I would request Microsoft to stop flagging this. Instead of making such determinations on English grammar/punctuation/spacing, I would recommend Microsoft to first improve the grammar checker in Word to implement the well-settled rules of grammar, where it is significantly lagging with nearly no developments since a decade or longer.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jasper3 7y ago
That's good. It's super annoying to read sentences that start with a double space, it burdens my reading speed.
throwaway55554 7y ago
Great! Maybe I can finally kick the habit.
domador 7y ago
I grew up putting two spaces after a period. A few years ago, after reading an article arguing for one space, I decided to try single spaces, as open-mindedly as possible. However, after a few days I ended up going back to the double space, since the single space just looked plain ugly to me. To me single spaces make all sentences look like run-on sentences, at least visually. On a different, though my side lost this religious debate, I have higher hopes for the eventual demise of all caps (which always look ugly to me, even in document or section titles.)
- wickedwiesel 7y ago
  WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH ALL CAPS? Personally, this to me (a digital immigrant from the EU), is like shouting at someone. Apologies for the rudeness. I wonder if this is universal among people who migrated to the digital world in the 90s? Is there a universal way of vocalizing net-lingo? Or how does this evolve over generations (do digital natives speak the same lingo that we learned?)

302 points by blondin 7y ago

How self-righteous are The Verge's writings about this...

sk5t 7y ago

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.

copperx 7y ago
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 they?
- jlokier 7y ago
  A wide space after a period is only sensible when the period ends a sentence.
  - rjknight 7y ago
    It would seem sensible to me that a word processor should treat a double-space as a hint that the preceding period ended a sentence, and a single-space as a (weaker) hint that it did not.
- alok-g 7y ago
  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.) :-)
downerending 7y ago
Agree. If this prohibition really takes hold, I will start limiting all of my paragraphs to one sentence. Who's with me?

pedrocx486 7y ago

This reminds me of the Tabs vs Space discussion, and how once Bill Gates did an AMA on Reddit and his answer was that tabs was better because of consistency.

saagarjha 7y ago
Consistency with what, all the other code that uses tabs?
- citrin_ru 7y ago
  In code which uses tabs one logical indentation level is always one tab. You can show tab with different width in you editor, but the source code is consistent. If spaces are used you never know how many spaces is one logical level. There is no agreement - some people prefer 2 spaces, some 4 and may be somebody uses 8 or 6. Even worse - I sometimes see when in a single source file some parts use 2 spaces for one logical indent and some - 4 spaces.
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
They’re faster to use. They’re consistent between fonts.
- insulanian 7y ago
  > 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.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Not every editor can do this, and this sounds like a “solution” to a manufactured problem.
  - opo 7y ago
    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.

dubya 7y ago

It seems slightly odd, given that there are different traditions of between-sentence spacing, that there doesn't seem to be a Unicode character for the kind of space between sentences.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Time to give RS a new purpose in life.
ascorbic 7y ago
As with all letter spacing, the size is determined by the font metrics. There doesn't need to be a special character for it.
- thefifthsetpin 7y ago
  Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below? Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.
  - chispamed 7y ago
    Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert “fi” into a character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so there’s definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Are fonts Turing-complete now? I have a feeling they'll become such if not already there; a little programs, complete with configuration switches so that you can control if and how a combination of characters get converted into a ligature depending on surrounding context.
      - eperdew 7y ago
        TrueType font hinting actually is Turing complete. A font may contain programs that run on a VM that has functions, variables, unbounded loops, etc.

redwall_hp 7y ago

Good. The only reason that habit is a thing is because of typewriters, which are monospaced. Some people just cargo culted the practice long past its expiration date...which makes for awkward spacing.

CamperBob2 7y ago
The practice originally came from typesetting. If anything, it's more relevant and appropriate now than it was in the days when your font choices were limited to 12-point Pica and Elite.
- brandmeyer 7y ago
  Programs that do typesetting for you (Markdown, LaTeX), will ignore the number of spaces after the period in your "source" code and lay it out in the output with a single space. I've gotten in the habit of single-space in variable-width fonts, and double-space in fixed-width fonts.
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    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 the source as another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard extension.)
    - copperx 7y ago
      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.
      - 7y ago

amanzi 7y ago

Great! No more having to find/replace all the double-spacing in documents I review.

Gibbon1 7y ago
I came to say I know a couple of people that edit and format documents for a living and they hate getting documents with double spaces.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  Why?
  - sosborn 7y ago
    Because it is usually incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Because whether or not it is "correct" in some meta-sense, it probably isn't the style used by whatever organization they're doing the editing for. Organizations tend to have style guides for external documents. (And may go off different style guides/rules for different purposes.)
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Because double spaces mess up their formatting tools. So they need to purge them always. If they miss one sometimes it means they need to go back, remove the errant double space and start over. Bonus getting a proof back and the customer put the double spaces back in. Source: Way way too OCD for me ex-gf.
verytrivial 7y ago
Please don't do that.

robbrown451 7y ago

That's pretty obnoxious. I do two spaces out of habit, and would prefer it just removed them quietly rather than forcing me to relearn. (which is what HTML does, effectively.... it displays it the same if you use two spaces)

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
It's a setting in the grammar checker that has always been there. Just disable it again.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
- copperx 7y ago
  It's easy to forget that computers exist to serve humans, and not the other way around.
fossuser 7y ago
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.
- imustbeevil 7y ago
  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 unreliable a source is based on the inability to properly cite it.
  - 7y ago

basicallydan 7y ago

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 categorised one spelling as British and categorized the other as American, and it created a whole new hobby for many British people who fancied themselves the guardians of the English language, courageously pointing out whenever someone used the filthy, “dumbed down” version from across the Atlantic. We have these brave volunteers to thank for defending the purity of the famously consistent English language, and for these people we have spell checkers to thank. Thanks a lot, spell checkers!

toomanybeersies 7y ago
I don't think that's right, or at least maybe not for the colonies. I grew up in New Zealand and my mother was very insistent that I spelled and spoke "Proper English", rather than American English. This was before Microsoft Word was popular and the source of truth for the English language, especially for my tech-illiterate mother. She also didn't like me using slang, especially the Kiwi tendency to say "sweet as" and put "aye" on the end of sentences. Maybe it's a colonial hangover, trying to hold on to the British identity, or maybe it's because she had a less privileged upbringing and saw "Proper English" as a sign of higher status.
- docdeek 7y ago
  My experience in Australia was similar: always the ’s’ for Australian/British English, with the ‘z’ for American English. Well before spellcheckers, save for the teacher or parent who would spell-check your work and catch every organization and specialized, and correct your alphabet song to finish with ‘zed’ and never ‘zee’. :)
- kjcharles 7y ago
  I think it is a colonial hangover. It's the same in former British colonies in the Caribbean. We're thought "Proper English" in school and the American spellings are considered wrong. Local dialects are frowned upon in professional settings and writing.

avalys 7y ago

Argh! It’s not my fault, I was brainwashed as a child. I try to keep it down to just one space but I can’t help myself. I’m the victim here!

andrew_xor_andy 7y ago
You did a great job in that comment, though :)
- 3131s 7y ago
  It's just how HTML is rendered, you'll never know whether OP used 1 or 2 spaces in that comment.
  - shpx 7y ago
    If you look at the comment through the Hacker News API, there's two spaces before the last sentence. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?pri... Although, the documentation says that field is HTML, so I'm not sure what to think. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
    - rbinv 7y ago
      Same in the HTML markup.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
copperx 7y ago
Do you also press space twice after a period in Java-ish languages?
- jlokier 7y ago
  Personally, in comments I do that yes. I think the end of sentence space looks much better with two than one in monospace font, but I'm not especially bothered either way. When there is one space, it looks more like an abbreviation. I'm mindful that if I do that in shared code, some people will decide I'm incompetent, old or something worse (instead of reading the actual code; people can be petty), so I'll modify my writing style to please others. This HN comment has double spaces after the end of a sentence. Not that you can see it. I think it's a shame HTML ruined the possibility of typographically pleasing sentence spacing that looks distinct from abbreviations. Way back, I used to add wider end of sentence spaces in HTML when running it through generators (like Markdown to HTML).

rmason 7y ago

People have strong opinions on either side of this issue. I grew up with two spaces so anything else doesn't look correct. I did however get past indented spacing on paragraphs pretty quickly and that's mostly gone away. Thankfully book publishers still use them so they're not going away any time soon. Sure hope that Word has a way of toggling it off.

Angostura 7y ago
As far as I’m aware book publishers ask authors who are using word processors to use a single space.

svat 7y ago

See https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracliteanriver.com:80/?p=324 https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracl... for a great article on the history of wider spaces between sentences — how there were two traditions of typography and things started to shift towards equal spaces in the 1930s–1960s (i.e. inter-sentence space being the same as the inter-word space). I'm even holding on my lap right now a book published in 1957 by a reputed publisher (Parkinson's Law — Riverside Press / Houghton Mifflin, 24th printing) that uses wider spaces between sentences. As do of course all of Knuth's books (e.g. TAOCP Volume 4A from 2011). For some reason, the other typographical tradition (which I suspect owes its ascendancy to William Morris in some way) is dominant today (which is fine), but the way they've nearly completely rewritten history (e.g. blaming “double” spaces on typewriters) is mystifying. The current version of the relevant Wikipedia article is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_sentence_spacing&oldid=952211622 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_senten...

kqr 7y ago
I don't strictly oppose this typographical tradition; my native tongue has many widths of spaces (in particular between a measurement and the unit there should be a slightly narrower space) and I'm used to it. What I dislike strongly is this idea that one should alter the source manuscript to emulate these typographical conventions. It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. They are in no way equivalent!
- jefftk 7y ago
  > It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. Using a double space is a simple way of telling the computer that you want a wider space, because otherwise it can't tell that you mean the end of a sentence.
  - evgen 7y ago
    Similar to the spacing convention, we use two hyphens to signify an en dash and three for an em dash.

tunesmith 7y ago

I used to be in favor of double-spacing but then learned it was because of monospaced fonts. So now I only do it when my output is in monospaced fonts.

bdcravens 7y ago

Having learned to type on a typewriter in the early 90s (yet another way to date myself) for a long time I used two spaces in word processing and emails etc, and then switched to one as it seemed the popular convention. At some point my brain made the switch to what it considers "normal". It's been so long, I can't remember when that happened.

daxfohl 7y ago

Strange, I learned double spacing in school in 1991 and have somehow gone my whole life until today without knowing or noticing that single spacing was even a thing.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

peterkelly 7y ago

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 sentences is given a higher weighting than between words. So you end up with sentences being separated from each other by more whitespace than words. The exact amount will vary, as the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm [1] tries to find the most aesthetically pleasing set of places to break lines. Arguing for one space or two spaces misses the point. [1] http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf

brokensegue 7y ago
So I think it doesn't quite miss the point. the point is that you want one ASCII space after a period and then you want the layout algorithm to do something intelligent (like make it as wide as two spaces or 1.5 spaces). This is why "1 space" is correct and two spaces conflates different layers of document creation (the textual information to display and how it is laid out).
- jlokier 7y ago
  I think two spaces makes more sense as an input mechanism, although the ship has sailed so it's no longer possible. That way the document generator can tell the difference between periods that are inside sentences, and those which end sentences. When using one space everywhere in the input, the document generator has to guess, and will sometimes guess wrong. That's why HTML doesn't, and can't, do that kind of intelligent layout. End of sentence wide spaces in the middle of sentences looks awful.
  - brokensegue 7y ago
    I mean arguably then we would want a totally different character for end of sentence and not two spaces in a row. I think modern tools are smart enough to properly space "Mr. Foo" v."I was sad. John was happy." and if not you can always manually fix the spacing edge cases yourself without modifying the text.

mydongle 7y ago

Where did people learn to double space? I've never had anyone even mention such a thing in school.

Zanni 7y ago
Typing classes. That would be typing on an actual typewriter, not "keyboarding" on a computer.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  I was taught double spacing when learning how to write. The teachers specifically mentioned to write using an extra space between sentences.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  I learned to touch-type on a computer, and still learned to use two spaces.

jlokier 7y ago

I found these two thoughtful Wikipedia articles give an interesting background. I didn't know Vi and Emacs used to recognise double spacing as an end-of-sentence navigation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_me...

TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's still a configurable in Emacs. In particular, it's controlled by the sentence-end-double-space variable, which on my Emacs (27, built a little over a year ago) was still set to true by default, i.e. considering sentences to be separated by double spaces. I have a line in my config that disables this, as I'm used to the single-space tradition.
ferzul 7y ago
in vim if you run gqip to reflow a paragraph (or gq generally to reflow some area based on a motion), if the old layout has a fullstop at the end of a line, the new layout will have a double space after it
bm3719 7y ago
(setq sentence-end-double-space t)

DanielKehoe 7y ago

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 time) weighed in on the whitespace issue and complained “it’s mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this.” We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh? [1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...

ohazi 7y ago
Wow, that webhistory mailing list archive is quite the treasure trove...
- DanielKehoe 7y ago
  I got to thinking more about this and posted an essay to my blog [1]. Looking back, I wonder if browser developers could have applied the algorithms that Tex uses and perhaps web pages would look slightly more elegant. We take for granted the world around us. Web browsers work a certain way; web pages display the same space between sentences as between words. We forget that many things we take for granted are the product of a social process (or “social practice” as Mao Tse-tung famously said). In this case, something you probably took for granted (and probably never even thought about), was the product of a brief discussion in the summer of 1993 among developers who each had their own beliefs about what was right and good. Reading the archives of the www-talk mailing list reveals how part of our world came to be. [1] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-the-web-1993/ https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-t...
- k1w1 7y ago
  The very next comment thread is about unreasonable load that web crawlers create. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0001.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0001.ht... Great proposal from Nathan Torkington that search engines be called "Josie and the Pussycats". Somehow Larry and Sergey didn't get that memo.

throwaway_pdp09 7y ago

This kind of deliberate but trivial breakage can't be an accident, and there's enought precedent ("let's screw with the VS/office interface today shall we"). So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else. But I don't believe that 'correcting' a typographical convention is what this is directly about.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else. In larger teams and companies, changes move pretty slow through the design-development-QA pipeline. Maybe this change was made a year ago, and worked its way through the pipes only now?
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  What has this to do with my suggestion?

rs23296008n1 7y ago

I remember a typing teacher being very serious about two spaces after the dot[1]. He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a zero "0". Fortunately both of these rules are now firmly in the past along with witch burning. This is progress. [1] yeah, I could call it a period or a full stop. But its also a dot. Variety is the spice of life as is properly finishing your

willis936 7y ago
Unsubstantiated false equivalence.
slap_shot 7y ago
> He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a zero "0". Whoa, never heard that one. Did that have any major traction at some point? What was the point?
- snazz 7y ago
  Some older typewriters had no 1 or 0 keys: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/this_typewriter_has_no_1_or_0_keys_people_used_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/t...
  - rs23296008n1 7y ago
    The irony was that all the typewriter keyboards we were using had separate keys.
- milliondollar 7y ago
  Can confirm. Also learned that in 1988 in my typing class. Also learned lower case l instead of a 1. It was for typing speed so you didn't have to reach for the top row.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  Features of the typewriter I used in the 1970s as a kid (which was old even then): (1) Did not have a "0" key. Use capital letter "O". (2) Did not have a "1" key. Use lowercase letter "l". (3) Did not have a "!" key. Type ".", then backspace, then type "'". The typeface was designed to make this work well. The "l" looked close enough to a "1". The dimensions of "." and "'" were such that they fit together, and "'" did not have any curve to it that would look out of place on an exclamation mark. Here's a photo of the exact same model: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/wUcAAOSwmftc8s45/s-l1600.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/wUcAAOSwmftc8s45/s-l1600.jpg Other features, while I'm at it: (4) Had a cent sign in addition to dollar sign. This was nice because the symbol was used a lot in real life. (5) Had a key to type 1/4 and 1/2. (6) No backslash, of course. Which explains why old people mix this up so often. They aren't accustomed to there being two different ones they need to keep straight. (7) That LOCK key above SHIFT physically locks the SHIFT key in the down position. I'm not sure what you'd call the mechanism, but it's something like a pawl. SHIFT would normally spring back up, but this blocks it from doing that. You push SHIFT down further to release it. (8) You can load the typewriter with a ribbon that has red and black ink. (You can see red in the photo above.) There's a lever toward the right that controls this. (9) There is no enter or carriage return key, of course. The whole carriage (top part that holds the paper) moves side to side as you type. The power comes from being spring loaded. When you want a new line, you grab that shiny lever at the top left and yank the whole carriage to the right. So you are returning the carriage to the start of the line. (10) Note the TAB SET, TAB CLEAR, and TABULAR buttons. These work like a tab key on computer. You move to some column, push TAB SET, and it remembers that position mechanically. When you hit TABULAR, it moves to that position. Since the carriage is spring-loaded, this is quite lively. The carriage is metal and heavy (a few pounds?), and when you press TABULAR, it gets moving pretty good, and it slams pretty hard into the tab stop. (11) The platen is the roller that the paper wraps around. You can see a knob on the left and the right that can be used to turn the platen. It turns in steps corresponding to the height of one line. But the button centered in the left knob lets you release that and turn it continuously. So it's kind of an snap to grid function that you can turn off and on. You can use this for typing superscripts and subscripts or other weird effects.

seemslegit 7y ago

So war then.

smitty1e 7y ago

I try to explain to people that punctuation like "'" and "." is overloaded, and the real point of the second space is to disambiuguate. They just don't get it, and perhaps won't understand the problem until it kicks them in the shin. The appropriate counterattack might be to introduce some coding and just show how gnarly sentences are to process as a result.

prmph 7y ago
Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand
- viraptor 7y ago
  Especially the overloaded ".". Apart from usage as a decimal point and elipsis, where it's obvious, what are the overloaded cases?
  - jimhefferon 7y ago
    etc.
  - riahi 7y ago
    Abbreviations in the middle of a sentence (When he was talking with Mr. St. Cyr, he saw a bird. Then...”)
    - kwhitefoot 7y ago
      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.
      - leephillips 7y ago
        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.

jakub_g 7y ago

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 indentation. --- Talking typography trivia: in French language, it's mandatory to put a space before "double-characters" like : ; ? ! - the side effect is that it often allows to easily recognize a French person online even if they write in English. Most people: Hello! How are you? French people : Hello ! How are you ?

205guy 7y ago
I think you mean « French people : ... » I find the extra space much more common with the colon than with exclamation or question marks.
- jakub_g 7y ago
  Ha, you got me - I was in non-French thinking mode until the colon - edited :)
benhurmarcel 7y ago
A lot of French people are aware of the difference when they write in English though.
ginko 7y ago
I remember the two space rule driving me crazy when I used GNU typing tutor for learning touch typing. I ended up modifying the tutorial files to get rid of them.
tasogare 7y ago
First time I hear of it too, and that could explain how the "dot shortcut" (two spaces transforms into a dot followed by space) made it into the iPhone.
Theodores 7y ago

jrockway 7y ago

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 have to use the most primitive software tooling. Something that programmers never think about (because they are best equipped to program their own programming tools) is apparently something that results in national studies and extremely snide articles because nobody will make good tools for them that end the problem once and for all.

johnday 7y ago
> I have no idea [...] whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {". You never read your own code?
- MereInterest 7y ago
  Format to personal style on open. Format to project style on save. The project style is then consistent, but irrelevant.
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    I have tried this but the formater in Eclipse messes up too many edgecases or nicely column aligned struct definitions to make it work for me.
  - AgentOrange1234 7y ago
    This sounds good and might work for programmers who are working in well-established languages with mature tooling. For me, I’m opening so many kinds of text files, I’d need a parade of parsers and pretty-printers to pull it off. I can’t see it being a realistic option in the near term.
    - bottle2 7y ago

rgoulter 7y ago

"If you’re still [wanting to use double-spaces], 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." On the one hand, it's reasonable to assume that it would be a configurable option. On the other hand, I feel like having a title like that doesn't suggest it's an option/configuration. ("Word now flags double spaces after a period as an error" makes it sound like it's an error to use double spaces after a period). "What should the default configuration be?" is an entirely different question to the flamebait "which one is correct, single or double" (especially given that there seem to be a number of established uses of both).

getlawgdon 7y ago

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

DanielKehoe 7y ago
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.

Jemm 7y ago

Double spaces are considerably more readable, especially for those of us with visual impairments.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jasoneckert 7y ago

I prefer a single space myself. However, my copyeditor recently told me that, in order to promote distancing, MLA is going back to two spaces after a period for the remainder of this year...

yellowapple 7y ago

Well then I guess that's another reason I won't use Word (sure you can turn it off, and it's a minor annoyance at most, but still). You one-spacers will have to pry my double-spaced sentences from my cold dead fingers. It's been scientifically proven to be at least marginally superior¹ (no matter how badly The Verge wants to try to convince anyone otherwise), it's substantially less ugly than using a single space, and it's easier for machines to parse (a period followed by two spaces or a line break is unambiguously the end of a sentence, whereas a period followed by a single space is - unless the two-space rule is in effect - ambiguous). This is one substantial reason why, to me, no website will ever be quite as readable as a PDF (let alone print). At least a PDF-outputting typesetter (e.g. LaTeX) can intelligently account for this and add the additional spacing, and it looks fantastic and is delightfully readable when combined with properly-justified text (also a rarity in websites - and Word documents, for that matter). But with HTML, I can't even emulate it with double-spaces; browsers boneheadedly replace even the double-spaces with single spaces. I certainly don't buy the "saving time" aspect, either: Ifwereallycaredaboutsavingtime,thenwhybotherwithspacesatall?Imaginehowmanykeyswecouldfitintoakeyboardifwegotridofthespacebarentirely!Nottomentionhowmanybyteswe'dsaveineverytextfile. (More seriously, unless you really really suck at typing, one v. two spaces should be entirely insignificant in terms of time spent) (EDIT: and I'm only half-joking about that suggestion; there are plenty of examples of people who don't use any spaces at all after sentence-terminating punctuation, so the aforementioned example is just taking things to their logical conclusion) ---- ¹: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6 (The Verge mentioned this in the article, irrationally downplaying its significance)

verytrivial 7y ago

I stopped using Word when I need section numbering that wasn't completely broken. I am therefore not massively surprised they've left that broken for 20 years and decided instead to take sides in a white-space religious war. You know, to "help users."

matiasz 7y ago

https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences.html https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences....

RaceWon 7y ago

The only thing more annoying is my car locks itself if I don't open the drivers side door. So basically when you unlock your car; open a rear door to retrieve some items, dropping your keys on the rear seat to free up both hands, and then shut the door because (A) it's raining, or (B) it's blocking your path or (C) any other reason--you will be locked out, and good and truly fucked. It's pure genius! The only feature I enjoyed more, was the time the computer slammed on the brakes (for no real) reason while I was merging (my fault because I did neglect to shut off that idiotic automatic brake feature). There is however, no way to disable the automatic door locking feature. That reminds me--I need to tape a brick inside of one of the wheel wells so I can smash open one of the windows, so I don't freeze to death some snowy winter night.

wasdfff 7y ago

This ruined me when I first tried to use gtypist. Couldn’t easily see the double space and got like every line wrong the first go around.

progval 7y ago

> Microsoft has settled the great space debate No, Microsoft doesn't get to "settle" a language issue. This also reminds me that some (many?) French speaker believe upper-case accentuated letters (eg. É È À) are incorrect, just because it's impossible to type them on Windows (unless you know the right alt code, but most people don't) and typewriters.

WolfOliver 7y ago

I was so annoyed reading text with two spaces after each other that I've built a writing application [1] that just does not allow to insert two spaces or newlines. [1] https://monsterwriter.app https://monsterwriter.app

jccalhoun 7y ago

As Jebus intended. Now if we can just enact the death penalty for people who don't use the Oxford comma!

hyko 7y ago

An historic day. Here’s Bill Hill advocating a single space after the period back in the early 2000’s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY

alok-g 7y ago

If I as an author disable the check and continue to use double spaces, would it stop flagging on my machine only, or on the readers' machines too? If only on my machine, then the option to stop the flagging would do no good to me and I would request Microsoft to stop flagging this. Instead of making such determinations on English grammar/punctuation/spacing, I would recommend Microsoft to first improve the grammar checker in Word to implement the well-settled rules of grammar, where it is significantly lagging with nearly no developments since a decade or longer.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jasper3 7y ago

That's good. It's super annoying to read sentences that start with a double space, it burdens my reading speed.

throwaway55554 7y ago

Great! Maybe I can finally kick the habit.

domador 7y ago

I grew up putting two spaces after a period. A few years ago, after reading an article arguing for one space, I decided to try single spaces, as open-mindedly as possible. However, after a few days I ended up going back to the double space, since the single space just looked plain ugly to me. To me single spaces make all sentences look like run-on sentences, at least visually. On a different, though my side lost this religious debate, I have higher hopes for the eventual demise of all caps (which always look ugly to me, even in document or section titles.)

wickedwiesel 7y ago
WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH ALL CAPS? Personally, this to me (a digital immigrant from the EU), is like shouting at someone. Apologies for the rudeness. I wonder if this is universal among people who migrated to the digital world in the 90s? Is there a universal way of vocalizing net-lingo? Or how does this evolve over generations (do digital natives speak the same lingo that we learned?)