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Microsoft Word Decrees All High-School IT Teachers Were Wrong: Double Spaces Now Flagged as Typos

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

martyb writes:

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: 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.

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  • (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.".