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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 28 2020, @01:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-then-they-discovered-  dept.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word:

One space good, two spaces bad? (This story appears near the end of the article; scroll down to see it.)

Finally, Microsoft found time to weigh in on the age-old debate of just how many spaces belong after a full stop (or "period"). Thanks to an update, Word will apparently treat two spaces as a typo and festoon a double-spaced document with red, squiggly lines unless told to ignore the rule.

A debate for the ages finally settled. Where do you stand? ⚔️ https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1253655739379470338

— Microsoft 365 (@Microsoft365) April 24, 2020

Not everyone is impressed with change; this hack, for example, has fond memories of bashing away on the keys of a typewriter back in the day and slapping the spacebar twice between sentences [...]. It has proven a hard habit to break. Others, such as Jason Howard, senior project manager on the Windows Insider Team, called for a poll on the matter.

@Microsoft365 has thrown down the gauntlet. Apparently #MicrosoftWord will now flag double-spacing between sentences as an error.

Which side will you pick? Choose wisely...

— Jason Howard (@NorthFaceHiker) April 24, 2020


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by EJ on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:34PM (29 children)

    by EJ (2452) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:34PM (#987820)

    Two spaces after a period is not an error. It is an indicator that the sentence is over. I am so sick of Microsoft's software trying to tell me what it thinks I mean to do.

    Microsoft Word is the typesetter. When I put in two spaces, the stupid software should determine that I mean for that to be the end of the sentence, then figure out how much space to allocate to those two characters.

    I suppose my Linux machine should flag all instances of \r\n from Windows as an error too.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:44PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:44PM (#987826)

    It looks like you're trying to post a rant. Would you like help with that? AUTO ALL CAPS? Replace "!" with "1"? Click here to disable help (for a little while anyway).

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:21PM

      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:21PM (#987879) Journal
      AAALLLLLL CCCAAAPPPSSS IIISSS PPPAAASSSSSSÉÉÉ
      --
      Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:44PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:44PM (#987827)

    Since you mention stupid software, I've been sending comments with double spaces after a period to this webapp for 20 years now. Never did a developer on any site insert a non-breaking space into the rendered html. I DEMAND A REFUND FROM THESE FASCIST BASTARDS!

    • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:54PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:54PM (#987834)

      Your

      refund

      check

      will

      arrive

      in

      60

      days.

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by noneof_theabove on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:27PM

        by noneof_theabove (6189) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:27PM (#987880)

        Do it in pearl the right way - no spaces or new lines just run it together

        yourrefundcheckwillarrivein60days

    • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:57PM (3 children)

      by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:57PM (#987837)

      And yet, you only single-spaced this comment....really ingrained habit you have there..

      --
      Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
      • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:55PM (2 children)

        by Nuke (3162) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:55PM (#987932)

        HTML renders all white space as single-space. HTML did it years ahead of Microsoft.

        • (Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:29PM

          by DECbot (832) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:29PM (#987969) Journal

          If they really cared, they would use the &nbsp; to make the HTML respect the damned whitespace.  <--Like this!

          --
          cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
        • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:07PM

          by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:07PM (#988021)

          Fascinating.
          I guess I never noticed because as an adult I have always used a single space.

          I do vaguely recall a high school typing class that stressed two spaces in business correspondence. And a college medical transcription course that pushed single spacing to speed up transcription on the old Selectric ball typewriters, one less keystroke per sentence. I sucked at that course, as typing words like laperohysterosalpingo-oophorectomy always slowed me down considerably. I passed, but barely.

          I kept to single spacing after that.

          The more you know (the more you can fuck things up!!)

          (;

          --
          Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
  • (Score: 5, Touché) by epitaxial on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:27PM (7 children)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:27PM (#987855)

    If two spaces indicate the sentence is over then what the fuck is the period for?

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:44PM (2 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:44PM (#987863) Journal

      All I know is: no fuck during period.

      --
      Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:48PM (1 child)

      by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:48PM (#987977) Homepage

      For titles like Mr. and Ms. (I typed two spaces there but HTML/SN removed them. Now you can't tell if this parenthetical clause is part of the previous sentence or not.) There are no applications that automatically typeset the right amount of space after sentence terminating periods vs other periods without some kind of manual indicator (either double spaces or backslashes for LaTeX).

      People claiming that applications do so is a farce.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by jb on Wednesday April 29 2020, @07:34AM

        by jb (338) on Wednesday April 29 2020, @07:34AM (#988126)

        For titles like Mr. and Ms.

        But your two examples don't take a full stop because they aren't abbreviations, they're contractions, "Mr" is short for "Mister" and "Ms" is short for "Miss or Mrs". Same deal with "Dr", "Sgt", &c.. In each case, the final letter of the short form is also the final letter of the long form, so a full stop should not be used (unless you want to use the archaic form where all bar the first letter of the short form is written as a superscript, with a single full stop written directly under the centre of the superscripted letters).

        If you want a real example of where a title is an abbreviation and therefore takes a full stop, perhaps try something along the lines of "Prof.", "Const." or "Rt. Hon.".

    • (Score: 2) by https on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:52PM

      by https (5248) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:52PM (#987980) Journal

      "Period" has multiple uses, most notably abbreviations. Period space, abbreviation. Period space space, end of sentence. Oddly, sometime in my lifetime acronyms stopped getting periods after each letter, but even before that they kept the second space if at the sentence. I blame S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

      There are exactly zero methods for writing down arbitrary ideas that can't be glitched in some weird way if you wait long enough or try hard enough. Classic demonstration is this perfectly correct sentence:

      The old man the boat.

      I blame Godel. And S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

      --
      Offended and laughing about it.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:23PM (#988252)

      The period is an overloaded operator.

      Company Inc. is an accepted thing.

      The two spaces indicate the sentence is really over and you are not abbreviating anything. English is weird. Do not try to put to much thought into trying to make it sane. It is one part the history of itself, one part the accent of the user, one part poor/proper spelling, and one part crazy rules that try to help provide intent.

      Don't fret too much about it. That is the job of Jr. High english teachers. :)

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:59PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:59PM (#987899)

    I am so sick of Microsoft's software trying to tell me what it thinks I mean to do.

    It's all part of the slow but sure machines taking over, through MS. They just creep in every little nook and cranny they can. They'll eat away at Linux. They've started. MBA-types don't and won't know any better- they'll believe Linux is an MS API. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by gtomorrow on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:25PM (4 children)

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:25PM (#987916)

    I used to do real typesetting for a living, from setting lead type in galleys, to the Compugraphic MCS PowerView, to the Mac...so I'm God 🤣.

    Two spaces is an error, I don't care what they told you in typing class. Everybody get this tattooed on your forearm.

    And Microsoft Word isn't a typesetter. If anything, it's (and its brethren) like an electric typewriter which, among other things, allows you to put (as some smart-ass here already posted) three spaces if you so desire. But don't ever think it's correct.

    Consolation Prize: I too am sick of Microsoft trying to tell me what to do and have been for many years now.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:06PM (1 child)

      by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:06PM (#987981)

      My mother was a typesetter. She taught me two spaces when I was six.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
      • (Score: 4, Touché) by gtomorrow on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:39PM

        by gtomorrow (2230) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:39PM (#987989)

        We all love our mothers. They are our first "points of reference". Even for Ted Bundy. Or Donald Trump. Or Kim Jong Un. Or Dick Cheney...ok, maybe not Cheney (an influence works one of two ways).

        But you get my point...I hope.

    • (Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday April 28 2020, @11:17PM (1 child)

      by corey (2202) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @11:17PM (#988046)

      I came here to say this. Looks like everyone else feels the same. Out of my way, Microsoft, just let me type what I want.

      I usually have autocorrect turned off anyway.

      This made me remember a paper I read over 10 years ago about LaTeX. The crux of it came down to, you should not be interested or distracted by formatting and appearance when writing something. That's what LaTeX provides. You produce the text, in pure text format, and then worry about formatting it later. I guess these days, everything is about appearance and "brand". Anyway, I tried to dig up the paper but I can't find it. This looked similar though:

      https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/latex.html [dedoimedo.com]

      He did some tests, for example writing maths functions, and it was faster in LaTeX.

      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday April 29 2020, @12:32AM

        by Freeman (732) on Wednesday April 29 2020, @12:32AM (#988061) Journal

        Why would you type with autocorrect turned off? That's just asking tpysos.

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:26PM (5 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:26PM (#987967)

    Sorry to say, as much as I despise MS, but they're right here.

    No, two spaces is an error. The period indicates the sentence is complete. The only reason anyone ever used two spaces was because, in the Old Days, typewriters were monospaced, so two spaces approximated the extra space (about 1.5 spaces) that is found at the end of a sentence in a properly typeset document printed with proportional fonts. You can see this if you go look at old books. Typewriters can't be used for actual typesetting, or use proportional fonts, so they made-do with two spaces.

    These days, that's all obsolete. Any decent word processor uses proportional fonts, and can automatically put that extra space after a period. Most software these days simply ignores the extra space that so many people use. It's the same if you use a markup language like LaTeX or MarkDown: the extra space character is ignored.

    Microsoft Word is the typesetter. When I put in two spaces, the stupid software should determine that I mean for that to be the end of the sentence, then figure out how much space to allocate to those two characters.

    This is correct, and what they've been doing, but I guess they've decided to finally end the thoroughly-obsolete two-space convention by flagging it as an error instead of silently ignoring it as they have been. But there hasn't been a good reason to use 2 spaces in at least a couple decades now, and it's time to stop teaching people to do it, just like we no longer teach people to dial "1" before a "long distance" number.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:09PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:09PM (#987998)

      > just like we no longer teach people to dial "1" before a "long distance" number.

      OT, but I'm still in an area where we do have to dial "1" to get outside our area code. Over the years this has been very perplexing to international visitors to the USA--since numbers are often written without the "1".

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:57AM (1 child)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:57AM (#988375)

        Do you still have a landline? AFAIK, landlines are still like this. "We" don't teach people to dial "1" any more because almost no one has landlines any more, and cellphones don't use the "1" (unless you're dialing a US number from outside the states, in which case you need to dial "+1", not just "1"). I don't know anyone who has a landline any more. Even my elderly mother who lives in a small town doesn't have a landline.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:37AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:37AM (#988419)

          Yes, land line, still copper, works during power outages (we have big snow and ice storms...). But Verizon is stringing fiber in the neighborhood this month and soon we will have to convert to something else--FiOS or cable phone.

          Cell phone doesn't work well here, we're between towers or something. Business calls are frequent for me and I don't have time for "Can you hear me now?" crap from expensive cell phone toys.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:15AM (#988090)

      I'd mod you up if I was at home. You're the only person who got it right. So much ignorance in these comments.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday April 29 2020, @07:25AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday April 29 2020, @07:25AM (#988124)

      Anything done intentionally is not an error.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek