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from the and-then-they-discovered- dept.
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
(Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:26PM (5 children)
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)
> 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)
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
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
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
Anything done intentionally is not an error.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek