Post #264,763
8/14/06 1:10:34 AM
|
What bad habits would they be?
No, really, I'm curious. I'm sure all editors engender bad habits of one form or another; as a vim user for years, I'm wondering what habits it fosters would be considered bad. Or which habits it fosters at all.
I know one: the tendancy to either backspace back to an error and proceed forward, or leave it and repair it once typing is stopped, rather than cursoring back to fix it mid-thought.
Wade.
"Insert crowbar. Apply force."
|
Post #264,769
8/14/06 7:39:57 AM
|
Text editors in general and UNIX in particular
foster the flat-wrong assumption that two spaces are required after a full stop and that a backtick is some kind of quotation mark.
I really, really detest ``this''. It looks mingingly shit.
Peter
[link|http://www.no2id.net/|Don't Let The Terrorists Win]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
[link|http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?pwhysall|A better terminal emulator]
|
Post #264,773
8/14/06 8:39:45 AM
|
Two spaces has nothing to do with Unix
I was taught that way on a manual typewriter.
===
Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
|
Post #264,780
8/14/06 9:10:13 AM
|
Bingo! I was tought that in the 8th grade typing.
Not that I can type even today.
Alex
When fascism comes to America, it'll be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. -- Sinclair Lewis
|
Post #264,791
8/14/06 10:37:21 AM
|
Ditto - typing class in high school.
Though a quick google search found [link|http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/taylor/topics/doublespace.htm|this article].
--
Steve
[link|http://www.ubuntulinux.org|Ubuntu]
|
Post #264,796
8/14/06 11:00:13 AM
|
Stupid
I understand the difference between monospaced and proportional typefaces. I also know that the whole point of the two spaces was to make the sentence space larger than the word space. From TFA: If you use only one word space at the end of a typewritten sentence, it\ufffds not wide enough to make an appreciable gap between one sentence and the one that follows it.
...
More concisely put, double word spaces between typewritten sentences help to make the type look more naturally spaced and to read more easily.
Typesetting systems, on the other hand, use proportionally spaced typefaces, where the width of each character can be customized to accommodate the natural shapes of the letters (and not vice versa). When this happens, type sets more tightly, which makes word spaces stand out more. A result is that one word space after a sentence is sufficient to provide that visual cue. Two spaces simply look too wide. I'll just continue to disagree on this one. A period is supposed to represent a fuller break than just a comma. I like that break to be visually represented. ===
Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
|
Post #264,818
8/14/06 6:10:54 PM
|
Disagree if you like.
You will find no professionally typeset material with two spaces after a full stop.
You're entitled to your opinion, but it's wrong.
Peter
[link|http://www.no2id.net/|Don't Let The Terrorists Win]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
[link|http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?pwhysall|A better terminal emulator]
|
Post #264,822
8/14/06 6:39:33 PM
8/14/06 6:39:57 PM
|
I'd like to recommend
[link|http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881792063/sr=8-1/qid=1155595044/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-5610957-5315005?ie=UTF8|The Elements of Typographic Style], by Robert Bringhurst. It contains an extensive discussion on this... and he's fully in agreement with Peter, even with monospaced fonts. It's a great book; I'd recommend it in general, not just for checking out the question of full stop double space.
--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca] [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited by jake123
Aug. 14, 2006, 06:39:57 PM EDT
|
Post #264,842
8/14/06 8:48:12 PM
|
"Wrong" ... heh
How Marloweschatological of you!
especially in such times as multitudes of lazy composers imagine selves to be e e cummings each imagining that other punctuation is as dispensable as the full stop == two spaces as intended by [T]he [B]ard and ever since commas colons semicolons join the simple period now as compressible for some notion of efficiency this renders the paragraph as the new [.tar] homogenized sentence of corporate printing efficiency__Words.__fail.__but I digress[.__] perhaps when nothing is sacred then nothing shall remain legible too[.__] i robot
|
Post #264,861
8/14/06 10:45:35 PM
|
Dunno.
Saying ".__" is always wrong strikes me as a bit too dogmatic. Like others, I was taught in typing class that two spaces go after a period that ends a sentence.
A lot of text that's published is fully justified or uses [link|http://www2.ncsu.edu:8010/ncsu/grammar/Typo3.html|compensatory spacing] - the spacing on the line is adjusted to minimize the jagged right edge. An example is provided in the sample pages in the book Jake pointed out on Amazon. Saying there's a hard-and-fast rule that one space goes after a period seems a bit simplistic to me.
As the link says, with compensatory spacing, it's most common to use one space. But it also says that the proper choice can depend on the font used.
So, I dunno.
Cheers,
Scott.
|
Post #264,875
8/15/06 2:48:58 AM
|
If it's not dogmatic...
...why do no professional typesetters or designers use two spaces after a full stop? Irrespective of proportional or compensatory spacing, they don't do it. At all. EvAr.
Aside: the obnoxious habit that some people have of forcing the issue in HTML using NBSP entities just makes cut'n'paste more difficult, with the side benefit of producing copy that appears to have been typeset by a monkey on crack.
Peter
[link|http://www.no2id.net/|Don't Let The Terrorists Win]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
[link|http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?pwhysall|A better terminal emulator]
|
Post #264,792
8/14/06 10:41:46 AM
8/14/06 10:49:36 AM
|
Two spaces after the period . . .
. . was the norm for all typewritten correspondence and the full em space was used in printing. Having had both typing and printing classes in the 1957 - 1959 timespace I know this is what was taught.
Some time in the '60s this changed, probably because editors calculated how much column space could be saved by closing up the text. Now many word processors can't even handle a two space stop properly.
That other thing is caused by people trying to do things "right" without the propper characters available. The start quote and end quote are different characters in the type case but on the keyboard they have both been replaced by the vertical version used for both start and stop.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
|
Post #264,896
8/15/06 9:31:15 AM
|
LaTeX is guilty of the latter.
I did a quantity of semi-automated LaTeX generation. I always had to pay attention to quotes because of the counter-intuitive way it forced you to use quotes. :-/
I should mention that Microsoft attempted to solve the quotes problem. Predictably, they did it in their own, broken way: 1. the two characters they used were at the time not standard in the character set they used. 2. the 'smarts' in Word to detect which way were right wasn't reliable enough in the first version. So it sorta worked only if you stayed within the MS world.
Wade.
"Insert crowbar. Apply force."
|
