Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170/microsoft-word-two-spaces-period-error-correction-great-space-debate

by blondin • 6 years ago

302 258 6 years ago

montroser• 6 years ago

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

sk5t• 6 years 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.

copperx3• 6 years 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?

jlokier4• 6 years ago

A wide space after a period is only sensible when the period ends a sentence.

alok-g3• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Agree.

If this prohibition really takes hold, I will start limiting all of my paragraphs to one sentence.

Who's with me?

pedrocx486• 6 years 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.

saagarjha2• 6 years ago

Consistency with what, all the other code that uses tabs?

citrin_ru• 6 years 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.

PunksATawnyFill2• 6 years ago

They’re faster to use.

They’re consistent between fonts.

insulanian3• 6 years 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.

dubya2• 6 years 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_thibedeau2• 6 years ago

Time to give RS a new purpose in life.

ascorbic• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below?

Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.

gowld3• 6 years ago

There needs to be a character because a sentence is a grammatical concept not a lexical concept.

Mr. Bean is in one sentence, not two.

yellowapple5• 6 years ago

There are (maybe not explicitly designated as such, but en-space or em-space would be reasonable, I think). The problem is that there's no sane or consistent way to actually input these characters (besides perhaps a macro that detects double-spaces and replaces them with a single somewhat-longer-than-normal space).

redwall_hp• 6 years 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.

CamperBob23• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

dnautics3• 6 years ago

That's not true. Go look at the us constitution, which is not typeset. There are bigger spaces after periods, see article I section 2, lines 3 and 4 for two examples.

usr11062• 6 years ago

Even on typewriters double spaces has been an English thing. In German it has never existed. And I have never noticed that it would have been difficult in reading typewritten German text because one wouldn't see where the sentences end. But then some English speakers might joke that in German you note the end of the sentence by finally hitting the last verb.

French punctuation looks weird to me, because they do require a space before and after every punctuation mark that consists of two parts (question mark, exclamation mark, French double quotes (guillemets) etc). Haven't heard that they would have ever required 2 spaces in a row, though. No idea about Spanish and other big languages.

wirrbel• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:German_text_example_-_Em_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Example_of_french-spaced_...

orhmeh09• 6 years ago

It was required by APA until very recently , with the seventh edition. I feel zero shame for never paying that rule a gram of heed.

amanzi• 6 years ago

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

Gibbon12• 6 years 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.

PunksATawnyFill2• 6 years ago

Why?

verytrivial2• 6 years ago

Please don't do that.

robbrown4513• 6 years 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_thibedeau2• 6 years ago

It's a setting in the grammar checker that has always been there. Just disable it again.

gonehome2• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

peterkelly3• 6 years ago

I use LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) which just silently ignores the second space (acting as if you hadn't pressed the key). I think this would be a better way for Word to do it than flagging it as an error.

sjwright• 6 years ago

The problem is that Word is a WYSIWYG editor, so it can’t ignore second spaces. It must affect the layout.

(FWIW, I think WYSIWYG editors are a bad hack and should be avoided wherever possible. Either use a semantic editor or a real page layout program.)

throwaway_pdp093• 6 years ago

Heck no, never knuckle under and allow the computer to take over. It's there to serve you.

basicallydan• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

ycombinete• 6 years ago

I can confirm that South African education was the same as well, before word processors.

dependenttypes2• 6 years ago

I really wish that there were spell checkers that offered en-GB-oxendict.

MattBlissett• 6 years ago

GNU Aspell has an en_GB-ize-w_accents dictionary, which I think is what's needed. The source seems to be here: http://wordlist.aspell.net/

It's the UN's official version of English [1], and my employer's, and it's widely used in scientific publications.

I'd like to use it in Firefox, but the British dictionary extension[2] accepts both versions. I have "feces colored airplane modeling" marked as misspellings, and "digitized aeroplane signalling" accepted, but "digitised" is also accepted by this dictionary.

[1] http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/ed-guidelines/style/spel...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/british-engli...

funnybeam• 6 years ago

As a native U.K. person that went to school in the seventies (ie long before spell checkers), I can assure you that British English used S rather than Z in the kind of words you are talking about.

JdeBP3• 6 years ago

Part of the point being made was that British English did not. People put about the myth that this was a British/American thing, when it really was not. It's a French/Greek thing. British English incorporates both.

JdeBP3• 6 years ago

This sort of thing long pre-dates spell checkers, as other have pointed out. Here's an older example for you. The word "alright" existed fairly quietly and unobtrusively in the English language for decades, as a formation similar to "altogether" and "always", until Fowler and other authorities got hold of it after World War 1 and demonized it.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/all-right-variants.html

tqkxzugoaupvwqr• 6 years ago

I always considered “all right” to be incorrect. Interesting.

chrismorgan• 6 years ago

Huh, didn’t know “alright” wasn’t universally hunky-dory. In Australian English it’s a common word and that’s how it’s spelled, and I believe “all right” would be considered actively wrong.

jfk133• 6 years ago

FWIW, the Oxford English Dictionary lists it as all right; note that it is a distinct entry from an earlier (now obsolete) word alright meaning "exactly, just".

Regarding the spelling, though, it notes:

The form alright is frequent, although more widespread in non-literary printed sources (e.g. newspapers and journals) than in literary texts. Compare the standard spellings of already (adj. and adv.), altogether (adj., n., and adv.), always (adv). Although these analogues exist, the form is strongly criticized in the vast majority of usage guides, but without cogent reasons.

I suspect that while all right is generally regarded as the more "correct" form, alright will eventually be accepted as a valid alternative in modern usage, though traditionalists will be fighting a rearguard action for some years yet.

DanBC2• 6 years ago

But the confusion has been around a lot longer than spellchecks have been in common use.

-ize Vs -ize was a plot point in a 1987 episode of Inspector Morse: https://jeremybutterfield.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/ise-or-iz...

jfk133• 6 years ago

-ize Vs -ize was a plot point

Amusingly, I suspect autocorrect may have destroyed your point here!

itronitron• 6 years ago

related story, Brits used to call Soccer Soccer and not Football >> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/wh...

hydrox24• 6 years ago

New Zealand's largest newspaper is deeply conflicted. With the World Cup underway in Brazil, should The New Zealand Herald refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? The question has been put to readers, and the readers have spoken. It's "football"—by a wide margin.

Interestingly, if you asked Australians, it would be "soccer" by a wide margin.

sbuk• 6 years ago

According to the OED and paraphrased from the 1989 edition — arguably before spellcheckers were widespread; the use of -ize, for instance, is dependant on the root of the word. Words that stem from Greek, with the transitive sense of ‘make or conform to, or treat in the way of, the thing expressed by the derivation’, or ‘to act some person or character, do or follow some practice’. Words formed (in French or English) on Latin adjectives and nouns (esp. on derivative adjectives in -al, -ar, -an, etc.), mostly with the transitive sense. Words from later sources. Words formed on ethnic adjectives, and the like, chiefly transitive but sometimes intransitive. Words formed on names of persons, sometimes with the intransitive Greek sense of ‘to act like, or in accordance with’. From names of substances, chemical and other; in the transitive sense of ‘to charge, impregnate, treat, affect, or influence with’.

avalys• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

You did a great job in that comment, though :)

3131s• 6 years ago

It's just how HTML is rendered, you'll never know whether OP used 1 or 2 spaces in that comment.

copperx3• 6 years ago

Do you also press space twice after a period in Java-ish languages?

jlokier4• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

svat6• 6 years ago

See 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_senten...

kqr• 6 years 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!

jefftk3• 6 years 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.

tunesmith• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

peterkelly3• 6 years 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

brokensegue2• 6 years 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).

jlokier4• 6 years 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.

mezzode• 6 years ago

So it's basically the great tabs vs spaces debate again

yellowapple5• 6 years ago

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)

The problem is that I know of exactly zero programs other than TeX and the descendants thereof that are able to reliably distinguish between word-spaces and sentence-spaces without being explicitly told to do so (e.g. with double-spaces), and even then.

There are indeed different space characters in Unicode, and if Word wanted to do this right it would autocorrect <space><space> to, say, <en-space> or <em-space> (the way it already does for quotes, much to the chagrin of people including code snippets in Word documents).

svat6• 6 years ago

Minor quibble: having a non-integral “number” of spaces was not a TeX innovation; Knuth was just reproducing standard practice of fine typography. Using variable-width separators (TeX “glue”) is exactly how human typesetters did it for centuries. So it's not quite the right perspective to consider anything “a holdover from the typewriter era”, because that had never been typographical practice in the first place — in fact the typewriter practice approximated fine typography (rounding up the larger inter-sentence space to 2), rather than the other way around (see my top-level comment below/above).

In fact, with TeX's standard settings, the inter-sentence space has the same natural width as the inter-word space; it's just that when justifying paragraphs it stretches more (3x) and shrinks less (0.33x) than the inter-word space — the net effect is that inter-sentence spaces are (usually) subtly larger.

peterkelly3• 6 years ago

Good points, thanks for clarifying this.

We had a really long period of time where printed material was produced by professional typesetters, followed by a much shorter period where people started producing documents using typewriters and computers with software that worked with fixed-width characters. Then with with TeX, proportionally spaced fonts, and the desktop publishing revolution we got that ability back.

For some reason there are a lot of people thinking in terms of typewriters and 1980s-era word processors when talking about sentence spacing, which seems quite odd.

jfk133• 6 years ago

with TeX's standard settings, the inter-sentence space has the same natural width as the inter-word space

That's not quite accurate; the inter-sentence space does have a slightly larger natural width as well as more stretchability. It's right there in Chapter 12 of The TeXbook:

"Plain TeX puts extra space at the end of a sentence; furthermore, it automatically increases the stretchability (and decreases the shrinkability) after punctuation marks."

Specifically, in the default cmr10 font, a normal inter-word space is 3.33333pt, and an end-of-sentence space has an additional 1.11111pt (before any stretch or shrink is applied).

jjgreen• 6 years ago

Quite, typograpy does not have spaces it has space.

alok-g3• 6 years ago

Is it able to determine the end of sentences correctly all the time? If not, there needs to be some means for humans to indicate the same, and typing two spaces is a reasonable one.

I disable even autocapitalization wherever allowed as the systems just don't get it right. Instead of me trying to learn to correct when the system would get it wrong, I rather find it easier to just habitually do it correct by myself.

mydongle• 6 years ago

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

Zanni• 6 years ago

Typing classes. That would be typing on an actual typewriter, not "keyboarding" on a computer.

RandomBacon• 6 years ago

I was taught double spacing when learning how to write. The teachers specifically mentioned to write using an extra space between sentences.

yellowapple5• 6 years ago

I learned to touch-type on a computer, and still learned to use two spaces.

jlokier4• 6 years 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_in_digital_me...

TeMPOraL3• 6 years 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.

ferzul2• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

(setq sentence-end-double-space t)

DanielKehoe3• 6 years 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.h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...

ohazi• 6 years ago

Wow, that webhistory mailing list archive is quite the treasure trove...

DanielKehoe3• 6 years 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-t...

k1w1• 6 years ago

The very next comment thread is about unreasonable load that web crawlers create. 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.

TheOtherHobbes• 6 years ago

So that's why that happened.

Typographically, I don't think you can compare the visual effect of an extra period in properly rendered right-justified text with the effect when it's buried in the usual ragged-right default on the web.

In the early 90s most monitors didn't have the resolution to handle full justification without making it look like crap.

In theory it would have been helpful if there had been enough foresight to consider the situtation >20 years later. Because those neat margins look really nice.

In practice full justification would have used significantly more memory and processor power and would have been much slower. So although it's a shame we ended up with ragged right as the default, it's only become practical to consider high quality implementations - not just budget hacks - of more polished formatting in the last few years or so.

bottle22• 6 years ago

I don’t know. It sounds like you’re older and smarter than I, but whenever I see two spaces at the end of a sentence, I fix it to make it one space. It looks plain wrong to my brain

omnimus3• 6 years ago

Ragged right is not somehow inferior to full justified. It automatically creates rythm that keeps you engaged. There is reason most graphic profesionals prefer look of ragged right.

It's also pretty hard to have quality full justified text. To keep spaces consistent you need hyphenation and advanced typography algorythms like latex microtype package and paragraph composer like the one in Indesign. And it will still not be enough. You will need to have experienced human make adjustments - fix hyphenation and fiddle with settings. When you see full justified done well there is someone putting quite bit of effort so it looks well.

The reason it is so hard is that if you take somehow optimal length of 70 characters you will have only about 10 spaces on line add to that limit of 2-3 consecutive hyphenations at the end of lines and few longer words will get you to pretty tight spots. It's a balacne battle. Sure increase number of characters on line and then it will look even but long lines make things much harder to read and its the worst problem because you will not be able to catch next line.

Most often you will see justified text full of rivers or crazy big differences between space widths - both more distracting than ragged right. For some reason some people think its more grand and authorative but it is quite dogmatic view.

The main reason why it's used in books is that it saves space. On 400 page book it can make difference. But the publishers employ dedicated expert who does this work and goes page by page so everything is in order.

snarfy• 6 years ago

Thank you for this! I've been complaining for a long time this is why it happened - browsers eat white space.

amelius• 6 years ago

We should have gone with 1.5 spaces as a compromise.

oconnor663• 6 years ago

Or a slanted space, like a mezuzah.

plorkyeran• 6 years ago

Despite it being called "double spacing", TeX's inter-sentence spacing is actually only about 1.25x the inter-word spacing (before justification stretching is applied, at least). The argument is really just over whether or not the space after a sentence should be wider than the space after a word, and not how much wider it should be if so.

Skunkleton• 6 years ago

  Why compromise when you can do both?   With three spaces everyone wins!

f137• 6 years ago

I'm not sure extra space after a period is a convention in TeX, meaning it is added only when required by aligning text, not after every period.

cpach• 6 years ago

AFAIK it is indeed a convention in TeX, and LaTeX. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/tags/frenchspacing/info

michaelcampbell2• 6 years ago

Not sure if you mean if it's convention to put an extra space in the source input or the rendered output, but 'extra space' (as opposed "an extra space character") is definitely rendered in the output.

Gaussian• 6 years ago

A-ha! Another consequential web outcome decided in Urbana-Champaign. As an engineer and a writer, I have monitored this debate for some time. Editors of mine have usually lobbied for two spaces, while engineers I’ve worked with say, simply and reasonably, browsers reading HTML deprecate the extra space, so why bother? Now we know why. Thank you for the fascinating inside story. The traditionalist in me, however, the part that still enjoys a paper newspaper, will always prefer the luxuriousness of the double space.

svat6• 6 years ago

One of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do:

I think most books don't do this any more [have wider spaces between sentences]. Newspapers certainly don't. It's way too much trouble escaping out all the abbreviations.

If you need wider spaces between sentences you also don't want them indiscriminately after every period, so you need to exercise more care and indicate them differently in the input markup. For example, using two spaces:

    This is a sentence.  This is another.  Dr. Smith wrote in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. about NASA.  It was good.

Or in TeX, which makes the typical case easier by using the heuristic that a period after a lowercase letter ends a sentence, you need to indicate wherever this heuristic fails (you can also use ~ to prevent a line-break):

    This is a sentence. This is another. Dr.~Smith wrote in Proc.\ Amer.\ Math.\ Soc. about NASA\null. It was good.

Having to keep track of which periods are ends of sentences is a bit inconvenient in the general case, which explains why wider inter-sentence spacing was given up first in newspapers, then low-quality mass-publishing, then finally high-quality printing as well (almost). But typographers today (see my other comment) make it seem like this has always been the case and wider spaces was just a quirk from typewriters somehow!

mcguire• 6 years ago

Note: You should use nonbreaking spaces (the ~) in many places where they are often not used.

pxx• 6 years ago

Wait, what's the \null for and shouldn't there be a \ after Soc.?

taeric5• 6 years ago

This doesn't paint python in a better light to me. Two spaces is not so that you render two spaces, it just made it easy to distinguish the end of a sentence. Calling it mostly propaganda just shows even then the python crowd got strings of the day wrong.

Is also why two line feeds indicates end of paragraph. Works way easier than requiring container markers. Disagree? Just look at in house Java projects to see how many screw up the doc thinking they did multiple paragraphs.

And yes, that is the same thing. Books do not have extra space between paragraphs. It is a stylistic choice, period.

Groxx4• 6 years ago

How much of the book spacing is to save physical space? A fair number of larger / more expensive books that I have on hand, and nearly all non-fiction (especially technical) ones, do have additional space between paragraphs.

Potentially all the paperback novels I have within reach do not, though, agreed. They also have far smaller margins, tighter spaces between lines, and thinner paper.

dqpb• 6 years ago

Since someone must, I’ll go ahead and propose we instead use a single tab after periods if it’s the end of a sentence. :)

Groxx4• 6 years ago

Another piece of evidence in favor of "the debate rages" (though IMO more in favor of double-spacing): if typographers were even slightly unified in this, you'd see period-double-space ligatures that render as period-single-space.

Instead, I'm not aware of any common fonts that do this.

throwaway_pdp093• 6 years 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.

TeMPOraL3• 6 years 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_pdp093• 6 years ago

What has this to do with my suggestion?

rs23296008n12• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Unsubstantiated false equivalence.

slap_shot• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Some older typewriters had no 1 or 0 keys: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/t...

milliondollar• 6 years 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• 6 years 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

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.

shrimp_emoji• 6 years ago

Now if only C/C++ could join them. :3

JKCalhoun• 6 years ago

Yes, I remember double-spaces between sentences from "Typing" class in Junior High School (you know, before they even offered anything called "Computer Science").

Type-set lead blocks allowed for variable spacing, typewriters were more limited. When I see double-spaces now (in email, for example) I tend to draw conclusions about the sender's age.

seemslegit• 6 years ago

So war then.

smitty1e• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand

viraptor• 6 years ago

Especially the overloaded ".". Apart from usage as a decimal point and elipsis, where it's obvious, what are the overloaded cases?

MereInterest3• 6 years ago

Is the dot a period at the end of a sentence? In that case, there should be an m-space following the period, and line breaks are allowed after the period. Is the dot an abbreviation of an honorific (e.g. Mr. So-and-so)? In that case, there should only be an n-space, and line breaks between the honorific and the name should be forbidden. Is the dot an abbreviation of a unit (e.g. 3 lb.)? In that case, the period may or may not also indicate the end of a sentence, and should have an m-space or n-space depending on which it is.

While I think the typesetting software should be smart enough to distinguish these cases on its own, like LaTeX does, the parent's point is that the user can add extra information in the form of double spacing to indicate what length of space is appropriate.

ghaff3• 6 years ago

Quotation marks are particularly overloaded (and arguably overused). They can mean:

- A literal quote from somebody

- A way to indicate so-called, a term of art, etc.

- Scare quotes

- Certain titles, e.g. TV episodes

jakub_g3• 6 years 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• 6 years 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_g3• 6 years ago

Ha, you got me - I was in non-French thinking mode until the colon - edited :)

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

A lot of French people are aware of the difference when they write in English though.

ginko• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

Theodores2• 6 years ago

I only just worked out that the two spaces I see in text that I format must invariably come from Word docs exported as text. I am from the eight bit era so I intuitively save bytes where I can.

recursive• 6 years ago

Not only. Some of us just always type like that. In my case, I almost never use Word, so this change is not going to affect me.

roelschroeven• 6 years ago

I learned to type when I was a kid (in Flanders), around the year 1985 or so (on a purely mechanical typewriter) and we learned to type two spaces after a period. Also I never learned to put a space before colons etc. I feel like I know the rule is to not do that, but I'm not sure where, if ever, I learned that rule.

In Belgium we use the same AZERTY keyboard layout with France (largely) but apparently the typographical rules vary widely.

gglnx• 6 years ago

In German this is called Plenken [1] and if you're writing spaces before such double-characters, many people will think that you're not the smartest person. Angry comments under news articles often using this. Something this is called "Deppenleerzeichen" (idiot's space), but this is yet another thing in the German language [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita

leddt• 6 years ago

I'm French Canadian and I usually avoid the space before those characters because they have a tendency to wrap on a new line by themselves. You are supposed to use non breaking spaces but most tools won't do it automatically, and they are not trivial to type.

lloeki• 6 years ago

IIRC alt-space inserts a NBSP utf8 character on macOS and Linux basically anywhere. It’s been too long since I used Windows but I recall something like that working (maybe only in some select software though).

Now the visual feedback though... It usually appears as a regular space.

weinzierl2• 6 years ago

In TeX or LaTeX the command to turn the extra space after the period on and off is called \frenchspacing. I remember this because the proof reader of my theses asked me why I had so inconsistent spacing between the sentences and told me that I should stick with a single space. I remember that I had little time to figure it out and that I was very happy when I found that the \frenchspacing command would do it.

I don't remember if \frenchspacing means extra space or no extra space though. Also don't remember if it is a TeX or LaTeX command, and therefore if Knuth called the option like that or if it is Lamport's invention.

jwilk• 6 years ago

\frenchspacing = single spacing

\nonfrenchspacing = double spacing (default)

They are both TeX commands.

ken2• 6 years ago

While we're on the topic of typographical prejudice, I confess that if I see a Microsoft Word document at all, I tend to assume the author is not so technically literate.

The intersection of "people I've seen use Word" and "people who know how to write a program" is extremely small.

sideshowb4• 6 years ago

Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long?

Reasons for technical people to use word:

1. A non technical person may need to edit or even just comment on the document at some point

2. It's stupid, but in a lot situations people are conditioned to take an email with the real content attached in a word doc more seriously than a plain email. You could use a PDF to the same effect but see point 1.

3. Actually imo it's the best tool for the job it's designed for. Markup/markdown and adobe have their places but not in everyday business writing. Or even scientific, it beats latex for journal papers imo (see point 1).

esoterica• 6 years ago

Are all the technical people you know eccentric Richard Stallman types? There’s definitely a subdemographic out there that would never touch Word, but out in the real world everyone (technical or not) uses word processors (almost always MS Word) to produce low effort documents.

lostgame• 6 years ago

Beyond LibreOffice, or the privacy-violating Google Docs, can I legitimately ask what word editing software you would suggest as an alternative?

I’ve never before head of the use of Microsoft Word as anything but professional.

I’m a senior iOS dev, I’ve been in iOS, web development, and more recently AR/VR, I’ve never used anything but, I’ve never been instructed to use anything but, and I’ve also had many a job where it was a requirement.

michaelcampbell2• 6 years ago

Not just French. I see it a lot from other non-native-english speaking cultures.

aembleton2• 6 years ago

When I did my Pitman typing qualifications in the UK in the late 90s, 2 spaces was mandatory. That is where I learnt it from, and still keep doing it to this day as muscle memory.

jrockway• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

I have no idea [...] whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {".

You never read your own code?

MereInterest3• 6 years ago

Format to personal style on open. Format to project style on save. The project style is then consistent, but irrelevant.

quicklime• 6 years ago

Being a programmer won't save you from this particular style war. If there's a comment in your code with a sentence that begins with a double space, your code formatter probably won't flag or remove it in the same way that MS Word will. And it's likely shown in a monospace font, which makes it more noticeable.

How many spaces do people put after a full stop in comments in their code?

I go with one, but Vim's J and gq commands annoyingly insert two spaces when joining sentences from separate lines. I'd love it if someone could tell me how to fix this.

Edit: found it, the command is "set nojoinspaces"

ip26• 6 years ago

Broadly speaking, internal consistency is the best & most important style. So just follow the convention of the codebase you are working in (ideally with a code formatter to help)

taeric5• 6 years ago

It is even more amusing in Java. Many folks essentially try to do markdown, not realizing that they are probably writing one giant paragraph.

aembleton2• 6 years ago

I go for two, but that's only because it is now in my muscle memory to apply two spaces after a full stop. This came about when I was doing a typing certificate in the UK in the late 90s and I've continued to do it ever since.

ken2• 6 years ago

You have your text editor set up to use a formatter which handles the number of spaces after periods, in source code comments and plain text files? How?

maxerickson• 6 years ago

This isn't the same kind of text formatting as that though.

rgoulter• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

DanielKehoe3• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

jasoneckert• 6 years 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...

yellowapple5• 6 years 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 (The Verge mentioned this in the article, irrationally downplaying its significance)

verytrivial2• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

RaceWon• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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

jccalhoun• 6 years ago

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

hyko• 6 years 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

alok-g3• 6 years 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.

jasper3• 6 years ago

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

throwaway55554• 6 years ago

Great! Maybe I can finally kick the habit.

domador• 6 years 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• 6 years 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?)

Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors

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