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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


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by lentilla on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:27PM (1 child)

    by lentilla (1770) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:27PM (#987949)

    Why would you want to type   after every sentence?

    An example of appropriate use of Non-Breaking SPace would be "Mr Smith" (the non-breaking space goes between the "Mr" and "Smith", indicating to the typesetter that it is undesirable to have "Mr" at the end of one line and "Smith" at the beginning of the next).

    - - -

    Whist we are on the subject of spaces-after-sentences... I am very much in the two spaces camp. Two spaces following a period clearly indicate a new sentence - just as two newlines clearly indicate a new paragraph. Converting from two-spaces is to any other format is dead simple but to do the inverse requires manual proof-reading. (For example: is "Mr. Smith" one sentence or two?)

    Now; once again; we must thank Microsoft for indoctrinating generations of people with a firm belief that a sub-standard method is gospel - CSV comes to mind - just about the worst "format" known to mankind. It's insidious because both one-spacing and CSV "makes sense" to just about everybody who hasn't written a parser, so it's impossible to convince them otherwise.

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  • (Score: 2) by progo on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:31PM

    by progo (6356) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:31PM (#987988) Homepage

    Why would you want to type   after every sentence?

    I don't particularly care, but I was pointing out one "simple" way "two spaces after a sentence" is achieved in HTML syntax. My point, which I didn't state quite clearly, is that no one wants to do this in HTML due to technical hurdles, so I believe 25 years of this state of affairs in HTML has pushed the debate towards "meh, 1 regular space after a sentence is fine, anywhere."