@glennf could we interest you in researching the allegation that serif fonts improve readability for one of your fascinating series of articles? If there’s any scientific backing for it I’m sure you’d sniff it out!
@jbartus
It will take me a few minutes to pull that citation outta my ass. Hang on, don’t be impatient. Oh, here it is. Let me wipe it off. OK:
“I read it somewhere on the internet”.
Yeah, baby!
;
Actually, a graphics, layout, and typesetter guy who worked at a local humongous (for N Texas) printing house told me that decades ago. Unfortunately for my cred, he’s long since retired, and I don’t remember his name.
;
I hope this response was sufficiently weak and lame. If the zero-value content was lacking, or not up-to-snuff, please let me know, I’ll try again, OK?
@jbartus
Ya know, if that’s your attitude, then next time I pull a citation outta my ass, I’m gonna arrange for you to be the one who wipes it off before I publish it.
I always have and I always will. I. Will. Not. Stop. Ever. I don’t care what the experts say. It is just better to double space. I won’t stop doing it. Do you HEAR ME? I WON’T STOP!
@Yoda_Daenerys It’s part of the HTML spec. HTML essentially recognizes words and whitespace; it’s up to the client to turn that into an acceptable rendering. Since no major style guide calls for double spaces between sentences, it seems they’ve all chosen wisely…
@edlada All second spaces automatically removed because you are wrong. Two spaces followed by return is a line break in markup. Don’t confuse markup with your irrelevant typewriter nonsense.
Ohhhhhhhh, those dirty bastards. I see what they did. Like many websites, they took away my double spacing after the period when I post. I hate you for that Meh, I just hate you now! You are dead to me Meh.
@edlada Damn those meh bastards. That makes me want. to. triple space. Or quadruple. space. Hmmm…
SHIT! They single spaced me too. Without my permission!
Maybe, I need to hit ‘Enter’.
between.
sentences.
@edlada@daveinwarsh I think you must be doing it wrong. Just make sure you put two spaces after every period or question mark. If you do, it should work properly. I also imagine that you can put in multiple carriage returns, @Yoda_Daenerys.
@curtise “carriage” return. I can see we’re both used to typewriters. Also, I double space to get period-plus-next-letter-uppercase automatically. (Plus, I don’t code much.)
I went to elementary school in the 80s. We had computers, but the teachers hadn’t updated the curriculum to get rid of the typewriter-specific rules, and I was never taught not to doublespace in all my years of public education, not even in college. It wasn’t until I began writing fiction and submitting for publication that I learned the double spacing is archaic. I think I finally trained myself not to do it, but I have my word processor check for it an correct any way. Here’s a pretty good book on the subject
@HemlockTea
That book looks v interesting. Will check it out.
However, the human eye is not a computer-language programmed digital scanner either.
Which is why serif fonts. And why double-spacing at end of sentences. Because the eye/brain reads and parses more easily that way.
If I were submitting manuscripts to these new standards, I would, under protest, comply, because the point of submitting is to be considered for publication, not to start formatting skirmishes. But the new standards are, to my mind, foolish. Those rules will make a lot of sense when most compositions written in natural human languages are primarily read by machines and AI constructs. Till then, no.
@HemlockTea
My Android phone is variable on this, to some degree, depending on context of entry.
I just want the spaces to be there. I don’t care how the got there.
Regarding Robin Williams - thought I recognised the name. Already purchased one of her books, a few months back, as yet unread. Sigh. Am behind by something like 5K books.
About to complete the purchase of the book you mentioned. Much thx.
@HemlockTea
I love this Slate article for all the wrong reasons. It’s so bloody - and to my mind, unjustifiably - arrogant. “Can point to no studies”. Indeed.
Perhaps the article is correct, or perhaps an example of plain “ultra-educated herd think”. I’m not a design aficionado, and my personal reaction to much of “good design” is {love} and my reaction much of “good design” is “what fucking bullshit”. I am not noted for particular wisdom here, or anywhere.
The various expert reactions cited in the article are, to me, like, “over-react, much?” But who knows? Not me. But, ya know, they are such experts. Like those people who tell you what to wear. Uh huh. Or all those incredible architects responsible for the famous “oddball tall eclectic mirror-box with a turd sculpture in the plaza” architectural look of modern Manhattan. Such genius! At getting design contracts, and creating functional buildings, perhaps. Aesthetics? Yeah.
OMG I am currently in bad taste. Quick, I can hide among the “people of Walmart”, perhaps none if those design know-it-alls will notice me. If their eyes do focus on me for a sec, no harm no foul - I’m just one of those “flyover people”.
OK, I have a bit of fun w this. Guilty as charged.
Please understand, this is my reaction to the “aesthetics police” quoted in the Slate article, not to generally intelligent people, and certainly it’s not my reaction to your thoughts - I appreciate your comments and intend to hunt down more of them. Thx.
I finally gave in sometime last year, as I didn’t know single-spacing after a period was even a thing. I actually like it (don’t throw rotten tomatoes at me.)
What I cannot get used to is punctuation inside parentheses. Was that always the rule? I don’t remember that.
@ruouttaurmind Probably because it’s often wrong. If you can remove the entire parenthetical remark and have the sentence still make sense, the period goes outside the end parenthesis.
@emilyap my 5th grade English teacher drilled into us “comma-quote” as in punctuation inside quotes unless the punctuation is about the quote i.e.
Jane said "I live for chocolate."
versus
Can you believe Jane said “I live for chocolate”?
But i seem to be in a minority on this practice (i usually see the period on the first sentence outside the quote). -{note i am using your rule about where period goes relative to end parenthesis, learn something new every day. Thanks!)
@emilyap So if it is truly a parenthetical comment, period goes at the end (as illustrated thusly).
If it’s not a truly parenthetical comment, it has no business inside parentheses anyway. It should either be incorporated as a component of the primary sentence, or separated into it’s own sentence. This paragraph illustrates such an example.
@mollama My issue with this particular style has always been about leaving one sentence “unfinished” in favor of proper punctuation of the quote. My rationalization? Shouldn’t the primary sentence be completed?
As a side note, what if the quotation is incomplete?
Jane’s actual words: “I love chocolate, but sometimes it upsets my stomach.”
The writer informs the reader of Jane’s love for chocolate, but not her intestinal distress: Jane said “I love chocolate”.
Without checking Elements of Style or the NY Times Manual of Style and Usage, I believe I’ve placed the period properly in both quotes. Do you concur?
To further complicate the issue of quotations and punctuation, the quotation may precede attribution: “I love chocolate, but sometimes it upsets my stomach” said Jane. It’s a complete quotation, but what is the proper application of punctuation in that case? Perhaps: “I love chocolate, but sometimes it upsets my stomach.” said Jane.
“The universe contains proofreaders and editors to remember this shit so we don’t have to” said @f00l. And I thank the universe regularly for my editors and proofreaders!
@ruouttaurmind
Except that auto-correct really fucks with this, and end-of sentence spacing, and can throw out extra periods. Hiss.
I won’t turn auto-correct off, not on my phablet (shiver, ugly but lovable word), because, as Ann Landers would point out, I’m better off with than without.
@ruouttaurmind
Re attribution after quote, within one sentence:. Comma to end the complete statement quoted, and then finish sentence after attribution? Inside or outside quote marks? Not sure.
No wonder modern fiction writers often mess with this.
My problem with: “I love chocolate, but it upsets my stomach,” said Jane. This potentially leads the reader to believe Jane may have gone on to say more about her affection for chocolate. It’s not clear that Jane was quoted in full.
But alas, I neither write, proofread or edit. “I have people to do that.”
@ruouttaurmind I was right there, with you, until or separated into it’s own sentence (instead of its). No, no, no. No apostrophe in the possessive form, only in the contraction of it is. Please.
@ruouttaurmind Someone may have already corrected you on this, but you should refresh yourself on the rules for apostrophes, specifically “its” vs. “it’s.”
edit “I am not at all surprised that it was @Shrdlu,” said @baqui63.
@Shrdlu
I screw this up a lot, I suspect, and I do know the difference. I mean, you can sound it out in your head if you need to. “It is” fits into the statement, or it doesn’t: which gives the correct spelling.
But…auto-correct makes all sorts of assumptions, often incorrect ones. I am often posting in a rush. Effing touch kb and all. Auto-correct “fixes” it’s/its to be incorrect a lot. Sometime I catch that error, or other ones, or typos. I suspect, more often, I do not. Those stoplights can go green at the wrong moments.
I run a little publishing company and encounter this often with copy. Double spacing wreaks havoc on hyphenation and justification algorithms. This is particularly significant in a multiple column page layout such as a newspaper or shopper (i.e. classified ads, penny shopper, real estate shopper, auto shopper, etc).
My editors and production crew fight an endless battle with double space, all caps, and “hard return” (another typewriter throwback) as well as more modern maladies like formatted text (bold, italics, underlining and such), charts and tables, and the much beloved “11 fonts in a single document”.
@jbartus, @f00l, My designers absolutely LOVE it when they get “camera ready” advertising composed mostly with Comic Sans and Hobo… and created in MS Publisher. Or better still… PowerPoint.
@ruouttaurmind Power Point isn’t actually that bad since you can actually kinda sorta layout on it… there’s no grid or line height or anything mucking with things. The shit people come up with in MS Word though…
The worst part is when people send me ‘vector’ artwork and it’s a low resolution bitmap pasted into Illustrator and exported as an AI or EPS file.
@jbartus We request camera ready stuff be PDF, or alternately ID or PS/Illustrator files. When forced, we’ll accept Quark files. We’re constantly fighting the battle of PDF files that are actually flattened low res RGB JPEG images, usually consisting of watermarked clip art pilfered from the Interwebs, then converted to PDF with SodaPDF or some other free tool.
Even if the original JPEG is a decent res, inevitably we’ll be asked to change something. “My designer is on vacay” or in jail or too expensive or whatever. Sorry folks! Can’t edit a raster image. Usually it’s phone numbers, event dates, etc. and we can get away with placing a text box over the old info. Matching font colors and background colors can be a challenge though.
@ruouttaurmind I’ve fallen into the habit of having stuff vectored in India for $5-10 per design and going from there. They have no compulsion about watermarks and I couldn’t work for that kind of money so it’s a win-win-win. I don’t have to do ripoff art, Indians make money, client pays a low price.
I old enough to have learned typing on a typewriter, so old habits of double spaces remain. Given the writing skills of people these days, and lack thereof, I think this is the least of our worries.
(Ignore the missing ‘am’ in the above post. It was 3-ish in the morning - I should not have been posting and should have just been blamed @sammydog01 instead that I got woken up.)
@f00l Eh the new economy. We have shit, quality is a nefarious concept. Look at the quality of textiles let alone heavy goods. No one much cares as long as there is some form of pablum to keep them entertained. The present generation thinks it has always been this way. But there are selfies and TMZ. This website is part of that. Don’t beat yourself up. Fuckin Alvin Toffler was more right than he ever expected.
I learned double spacing wasn’t accepted anymore, so I changed. It was the easiest change I ever made. I actually like the single space because it takes less time.
@arysta it doesn’t take less time for me, because i still type the double space and then have a sentence later have to scroll back and delete the 2nd space.
I don’t think I’ve done double space since high school. And I’m no youngin’. But I was an early adopter of computers, so maybe I just went with the program.
I still do it out of habit sometimes but I’ve tried to stop. My wife does a significant amount of writing (doctoral thesis and grant writing) and she has moved away from double spacing completely. In my everyday life of writing emails and such it really doesn’t matter. In her everyday life it matters significantly more.
If I am writing courseware or a presentation I do it for readability. After reading all this I see when I publish I will have to not do it.
And I always put the period or comma outside the parenthesis - fuckin’ A!
The last time I remember being told to double space was in college a number of years ago. I think I might of used it briefly in emails… But I think the practice has been lost on me now.
Not my style. I did do it once or twice in college when trying to make my papers longer! Also did the thing where you make the periods a bigger font. #iaintgottimeforthis
I do unless I’m typing in a form field with a character limit. I also always use the Oxford comma. They both make reading easier.
Edit: Seems as though the meh forums strip out the extra space. See? I typed two there and it looks like one.
@medz Nope, it’s good ol’ HTML that does that. Check it out, your space is still in the page’s source:
…but HTML knows that double spaces are the work of the devil. Well, that’s not exactly true, I suppose, it’s more just the idea that content and rendering are separate. There are likely good historical reasons for this as well, from HTML’s SGML/GML ancestry. The spec has this tongue-twister to offer:
In particular, user agents should collapse input white space sequences when producing output inter-word space.
@medz Noooooooooooo! In seriousness, though, I waste a lot of time deleting s from content I’m given. Takes more effort than just deleting a space.
@jbartus Yeah, it comes in handy for that modern luxury, but that’s still just a separation of content and rendering. The HTML spec essentially says that your content is a big pile of words, to be rendered out by the client according to linguistic standards. This has stood the test of time, as we evolved past 80 characters and grew tab keys. But it’s really not difficult to trace it back to the late 60s/early 70s. Berners-Lee was an SGML dude. SGML, of course, was born of IBM GML, and by extension DCF, and SCRIPT. The concern at this point was less ‘how many spaces should I use for a tab!?’ and more ‘if I indent this at all, how many fires will the S/370 catch on?*’ Because of the rules it had to follow in order to turn into valid SCRIPT, GML had a lot of strict rules governing spacing…
Begin each new sentence on a new line. When you end a sentence, do not enter any more text on that line.
…but at the same time, breaking up content was necessary for a complex, stylesheet-based document engine running on limited memory…
For convenience in handling, divide a large document into several source documents and store each part in a separate computer file. Ensure that each file starts at the beginning of a paragraph unit or higher-level element and ends at the end of one.
Enough disparity existed in the need for ways to transparently merge content broken apart in various ways, and the frustration over adhering to rules dictated by GML being a layer atop SCRIPT. When SGML was developed, those folks made damn sure that whitespace was flexible, a delimiter of words only, and here we are today.
One final note: even prior to this, the quoted GML spec lays out some sense of simply taking in content and applying linguistic conventions at the rendering stage:
SCRIPT/VS will automatically add two blanks between sentences.
…sigh.
*: Indentation?! “Start all lines at the left margin of the source document. There should be no leading blanks. Leading blanks cause the SCRIPT/VS .LB [Leading Blank] control word to be processed. Trailing blanks at the end of an input line are ignored.”
@AnnaB THIS! YES! Inconsistency sticks out much more obviously than just about any other formatting error. If it’s formatted “incorrectly” but done consistently, it still feels right. Just do the same freakin’ thing always and we’re all good!
I’m in middle school so I generally don’t use double spaces, though I will when I have to lengthen an essay in English. I also tend to indent paragraphs twice and use an online thesaurus because screw English.
I am one of the die hards. I truly believe that there should be two spaces after every full stop. Anyone who thinks otherwise is incorrect. Double spacing after final punctuation is just more elegant, wise, and delightful, don’t you agree? Millions of literary scholars can’t all be wrong.
I used to be a die-hard advocate for two spaces, even inserting numerous characters into my webpages to force them to render that way. It was the way I was taught back in typing class using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for the Apple ][. Then I read Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, which dramatically improved the look of my documents. The section “One Space Between Sentences” in the chapter on Type Composition finally convinced me I was being a stubborn fool about it. Who am I to think that I and my now long-retired elementary school typing teacher know better than the collective authority of professional typesetters? It took some time to convert a quarter century of typing habit, but it took a lot less time than I expected. Really, I think it was less than a week, and I haven’t looked back. I highly recommend the entire “book”, too. It is thorough and has dramatically improved the look of my documents, which I’d thought were already better than average.
@jbartus And Butterick points out that if for some reason you’re using a typewriter or a fixed-width font which mimics a typewriter then you should still use two spaces between sentences there.
When I was initially taught typing and Microsoft Word in middle school, we were told to use double spaces between sentences. Over my time at college I realized that people weren’t doing that anymore, so I just switched to a single space. I don’t really see a problem with either way. It should be a personal preference thing at this point.
@ninjaemilee
Typesetters, layout artists, editors, page and book designers don’t the “personal preference” approach that much. I suppose it makes work for them.
@ninjaemilee I suspect if you think back on it you’ll realize your teacher in middle school was older, probably 50s-60s at the point they were teaching you, and were still teaching typewriter practices to a word processing program audience.
@ninjaemilee@Yoda_Daenerys I think the lady who taught mine retired by the time I finished elementary school, in 1995, so, yeah, might not have necessarily been keeping with the times. Even the Apple ][s we were using must’ve actually been pretty outdated by then.
I learned 2 spaces in elementary and have used it since. Would’ve been nice if somewhere along the line a teacher retaught that it’s better as 1 space and the 2 was outdated from typewriters.
If I’m typing on a computer that automatically justifies on left and right, one space. If I’m typing on a typewriter or using center or left justification, two spaces.
Typewriters are things you can use to put words on paper in a faster and more readable fashion than handwriting, esp for formal correspondence and longer documents, and traditional models will work just fine off grid for decades, assuming sufficient paper and ink ribbons.
Actually, my fonty friend was from the typewriter era and would have sympathized. He would have, simply and elegantly, explained himself in our shared technical and conceptual language.
And I didn’t hide my practices. The issue was a quiet one, never rose from the deeps.
@f00l you can’t fool me! I know you secretly hid it from him out of shame! It’s like when my dog avoids a room he knows he’s pooped in, he knew he did something wrong.
@jbartus
I actually didn’t hide the double-space-at-end-of-sentence practice from “fonty friend” because I didn’t realize it was any sort of issue. Thought everyone did it.
;
Speaking of possibly guilty dogs spozedly acting out their shame after a so-called “accident” .,
You tried to shame me on “curiously-sourced” citations early in this thread. Hmmm. The shaming activity didn’t work so well. I have a new special “spurious citation” policy just for you.
See early in thread for details of the new policy update. Effective immediately. No appeals.
@jbartus
I know you were teasing. The penalty for that is eternal torment
/giphy eternal torment
Re: 2nd part of my earlier message, here is the response you missed:
And I quote:
…
"@jbartus
Ya know, if that’s your attitude, then next time I pull a citation outta my ass, I’m gonna arrange for you to be the one who wipes it off before I publish it.
I realized a while back I had mostly switched to one space after a period. Don’t know how it happened. But I’m chaotic about this. It seems to depend on how long my brain pauses while forming sentences. Sometimes it just feels right to hit the spacebar twice, and I have to do it.
I try to use two spaces after a period in source code (on the rare occasion I’m writing full sentences there – code comments or HTML content). I’m not sure it actually makes a difference in readability for monospace fonts, but hey, why not use two spaces when you can get away with it. When it’s HTML content I’m writing, it still works out because browsers remove the extra space when they display it.
I was cured of putting two spaces after a period when I got my first job in advertising. One space looks a lot tighter in layout. If I’d use two in the copy I’d write, the art director would give me a hard time because he or she would have to take out all those extra spaces.
The art directors had it even worse, though. If they used two spaces, a heavy from the typography department would march upstairs to the 43rd floor (well, they’d usually take the elevator because they were heavy) and give them a jolt with a cattle prod. That’d get anyone out of the two space habit right quick.
That, of course, was in the late '90s – not quite the golden age of advertising. More like the styrofoam age of advertising.
Fuck change. Please continue on course.
Double-spacing at a sentence end, like serif fonts, greatly enhances readability.
@f00l citation?
@glennf could we interest you in researching the allegation that serif fonts improve readability for one of your fascinating series of articles? If there’s any scientific backing for it I’m sure you’d sniff it out!
@f00l ah serif fonts
@f00l and oxford comma ooo yeah baby!
@jbartus
It will take me a few minutes to pull that citation outta my ass. Hang on, don’t be impatient. Oh, here it is. Let me wipe it off. OK:
“I read it somewhere on the internet”.
Yeah, baby!
;
Actually, a graphics, layout, and typesetter guy who worked at a local humongous (for N Texas) printing house told me that decades ago. Unfortunately for my cred, he’s long since retired, and I don’t remember his name.
;
I hope this response was sufficiently weak and lame. If the zero-value content was lacking, or not up-to-snuff, please let me know, I’ll try again, OK?
@f00l so… no citation then.
@jbartus
Ya know, if that’s your attitude, then next time I pull a citation outta my ass, I’m gonna arrange for you to be the one who wipes it off before I publish it.
Cheers!
Fucking bumping this fucking thread, since another thread is a fucking dup.
Everyone, pls return your previous attitude of not caring now.
@f00l huh?
@Yoda_Daenerys
OP had created 2 identical threads
so I bumped one to keep (this one) and pinged @t-chick to delete the other one. At 4am or whatever, so did all without being conscious.
I always have and I always will. I. Will. Not. Stop. Ever. I don’t care what the experts say. It is just better to double space. I won’t stop doing it. Do you HEAR ME? I WON’T STOP!
@edlada Ditto. Even though I have starting using sentences that aren’t sentences. Like these.
@edlada and web browsers will continue to refuse to render your second space!
@sammydog01 goats don’t care about grammar
@jbartus wait! seriously???, web browsers like you and me (or is it I) don’t acknowledge the second space ? Are you serious ? Render this <>.
@Yoda_Daenerys It’s part of the HTML spec. HTML essentially recognizes words and whitespace; it’s up to the client to turn that into an acceptable rendering. Since no major style guide calls for double spaces between sentences, it seems they’ve all chosen wisely…
@brhfl not to mention the havoc that would cause with output of code that has been indented with spaces.
@edlada All second spaces automatically removed because you are wrong. Two spaces followed by return is a line break in markup. Don’t confuse markup with your irrelevant typewriter nonsense.
Ohhhhhhhh, those dirty bastards. I see what they did. Like many websites, they took away my double spacing after the period when I post. I hate you for that Meh, I just hate you now! You are dead to me Meh.
@edlada Damn those meh bastards. That makes me want. to. triple space. Or quadruple. space. Hmmm…
SHIT! They single spaced me too. Without my permission!
Maybe, I need to hit ‘Enter’.
between.
sentences.
. D
@edlada for what it’s worth it’s not Meh that’s stripping them, repeat spaces are ignored per HTML specifications.
@daveinwarsh yes! carriage return line feeds will rule
forever
no
taking
away
from these
double
spaces
EDIT: some of those are more than one CRLF, f%ck&rs
@edlada @daveinwarsh I think you must be doing it wrong. Just make sure you put two spaces after every period or question mark. If you do, it should work properly. I also imagine that you can put in multiple carriage returns, @Yoda_Daenerys.
But I could be wrong about that.
But then again, I could be right.
@curtise “carriage” return. I can see we’re both used to typewriters. Also, I double space to get period-plus-next-letter-uppercase automatically. (Plus, I don’t code much.)
I went to elementary school in the 80s. We had computers, but the teachers hadn’t updated the curriculum to get rid of the typewriter-specific rules, and I was never taught not to doublespace in all my years of public education, not even in college. It wasn’t until I began writing fiction and submitting for publication that I learned the double spacing is archaic. I think I finally trained myself not to do it, but I have my word processor check for it an correct any way. Here’s a pretty good book on the subject
@HemlockTea
That book looks v interesting. Will check it out.
However, the human eye is not a computer-language programmed digital scanner either.
Which is why serif fonts. And why double-spacing at end of sentences. Because the eye/brain reads and parses more easily that way.
If I were submitting manuscripts to these new standards, I would, under protest, comply, because the point of submitting is to be considered for publication, not to start formatting skirmishes. But the new standards are, to my mind, foolish. Those rules will make a lot of sense when most compositions written in natural human languages are primarily read by machines and AI constructs. Till then, no.
@f00l Word processing programs already adjust the space size after periods (which old school typewriters didn’t do, hence the need to double space). http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html
@HemlockTea
My Android phone is variable on this, to some degree, depending on context of entry.
I just want the spaces to be there. I don’t care how the got there.
Regarding Robin Williams - thought I recognised the name. Already purchased one of her books, a few months back, as yet unread. Sigh. Am behind by something like 5K books.
About to complete the purchase of the book you mentioned. Much thx.
@HemlockTea
I love this Slate article for all the wrong reasons. It’s so bloody - and to my mind, unjustifiably - arrogant. “Can point to no studies”. Indeed.
Perhaps the article is correct, or perhaps an example of plain “ultra-educated herd think”. I’m not a design aficionado, and my personal reaction to much of “good design” is {love} and my reaction much of “good design” is “what fucking bullshit”. I am not noted for particular wisdom here, or anywhere.
The various expert reactions cited in the article are, to me, like, “over-react, much?” But who knows? Not me. But, ya know, they are such experts. Like those people who tell you what to wear. Uh huh. Or all those incredible architects responsible for the famous “oddball tall eclectic mirror-box with a turd sculpture in the plaza” architectural look of modern Manhattan. Such genius! At getting design contracts, and creating functional buildings, perhaps. Aesthetics? Yeah.
OMG I am currently in bad taste. Quick, I can hide among the “people of Walmart”, perhaps none if those design know-it-alls will notice me. If their eyes do focus on me for a sec, no harm no foul - I’m just one of those “flyover people”.
OK, I have a bit of fun w this. Guilty as charged.
Please understand, this is my reaction to the “aesthetics police” quoted in the Slate article, not to generally intelligent people, and certainly it’s not my reaction to your thoughts - I appreciate your comments and intend to hunt down more of them. Thx.
@f00l yea, what you said
EDIT: at least the first thing i skimmed
@Yoda_Daenerys are you saying TL;DR?
come visit!
I finally gave in sometime last year, as I didn’t know single-spacing after a period was even a thing. I actually like it (don’t throw rotten tomatoes at me.)
What I cannot get used to is punctuation inside parentheses. Was that always the rule? I don’t remember that.
I am an old
/giphy grammar rules
@looseneck I also have a personal struggle with punctuation inside parentheses (it seems wrong.)
@looseneck
@ruouttaurmind
The universe contains proofreaders and editors to remember this shit so we don’t have to.
@ruouttaurmind Probably because it’s often wrong. If you can remove the entire parenthetical remark and have the sentence still make sense, the period goes outside the end parenthesis.
@emilyap my 5th grade English teacher drilled into us “comma-quote” as in punctuation inside quotes unless the punctuation is about the quote i.e.
Jane said "I live for chocolate."
versus
Can you believe Jane said “I live for chocolate”?
But i seem to be in a minority on this practice (i usually see the period on the first sentence outside the quote). -{note i am using your rule about where period goes relative to end parenthesis, learn something new every day. Thanks!)
@emilyap So if it is truly a parenthetical comment, period goes at the end (as illustrated thusly).
If it’s not a truly parenthetical comment, it has no business inside parentheses anyway. It should either be incorporated as a component of the primary sentence, or separated into it’s own sentence. This paragraph illustrates such an example.
@looseneck Seems like people here are talking about punctuation with quotes rather than with parentheses.
@mollama My issue with this particular style has always been about leaving one sentence “unfinished” in favor of proper punctuation of the quote. My rationalization? Shouldn’t the primary sentence be completed?
As a side note, what if the quotation is incomplete?
Jane’s actual words: “I love chocolate, but sometimes it upsets my stomach.”
The writer informs the reader of Jane’s love for chocolate, but not her intestinal distress: Jane said “I love chocolate”.
Without checking Elements of Style or the NY Times Manual of Style and Usage, I believe I’ve placed the period properly in both quotes. Do you concur?
To further complicate the issue of quotations and punctuation, the quotation may precede attribution: “I love chocolate, but sometimes it upsets my stomach” said Jane. It’s a complete quotation, but what is the proper application of punctuation in that case? Perhaps: “I love chocolate, but sometimes it upsets my stomach.” said Jane.
“The universe contains proofreaders and editors to remember this shit so we don’t have to” said @f00l. And I thank the universe regularly for my editors and proofreaders!
@ruouttaurmind
Except that auto-correct really fucks with this, and end-of sentence spacing, and can throw out extra periods. Hiss.
I won’t turn auto-correct off, not on my phablet (shiver, ugly but lovable word), because, as Ann Landers would point out, I’m better off with than without.
@ruouttaurmind
Re attribution after quote, within one sentence:. Comma to end the complete statement quoted, and then finish sentence after attribution? Inside or outside quote marks? Not sure.
No wonder modern fiction writers often mess with this.
Now feeling some resentment re Strunk and White.
@ruouttaurmind
The period turns into a comma in this case:
Only periods are changes. Question marks and exclamations can remain:
@emilyap
Ahhh, thx!
@emilyap Now that’s not at all confusing, is it!
My problem with: “I love chocolate, but it upsets my stomach,” said Jane. This potentially leads the reader to believe Jane may have gone on to say more about her affection for chocolate. It’s not clear that Jane was quoted in full.
But alas, I neither write, proofread or edit. “I have people to do that.”
@ruouttaurmind I was right there, with you, until or separated into it’s own sentence (instead of its). No, no, no. No apostrophe in the possessive form, only in the contraction of it is. Please.
@ruouttaurmind Someone may have already corrected you on this, but you should refresh yourself on the rules for apostrophes, specifically “its” vs. “it’s.”
edit “I am not at all surprised that it was @Shrdlu,” said @baqui63.
@f00l wait, contains, or “includes”, what would your editor say?
sorry if this is so long you have no idea what i’m talking about/
@Yoda_Daenerys
I have no idea what I’m talking about, “irregardless”, hah hah hah.
No worries. I was trying to figure out and reply at red lights. I don’t know what I meant to say. As usual.
@Shrdlu
I screw this up a lot, I suspect, and I do know the difference. I mean, you can sound it out in your head if you need to. “It is” fits into the statement, or it doesn’t: which gives the correct spelling.
But…auto-correct makes all sorts of assumptions, often incorrect ones. I am often posting in a rush. Effing touch kb and all. Auto-correct “fixes” it’s/its to be incorrect a lot. Sometime I catch that error, or other ones, or typos. I suspect, more often, I do not. Those stoplights can go green at the wrong moments.
@baqui63, @Shrdlu, “it’s” yet another glorious artifact from the wonderful world of auto-correct!
@ruouttaurmind I feel the need to state that I am not at all curious about your best enema.
@baqui63
@baqui63
@ruouttaurmind
/giphy worst enema
I run a little publishing company and encounter this often with copy. Double spacing wreaks havoc on hyphenation and justification algorithms. This is particularly significant in a multiple column page layout such as a newspaper or shopper (i.e. classified ads, penny shopper, real estate shopper, auto shopper, etc).
My editors and production crew fight an endless battle with double space, all caps, and “hard return” (another typewriter throwback) as well as more modern maladies like formatted text (bold, italics, underlining and such), charts and tables, and the much beloved “11 fonts in a single document”.
@ruouttaurmind
Font Excess Is My Drug.
Mainline Me.
Now, motherfucker!
@ruouttaurmind Comic Sans is your friend.
Okay… I can’t even say that with a straight face.
@jbartus
Comic Sans: esp for Corporate Mission Statements!
@f00l
@jbartus, @f00l, My designers absolutely LOVE it when they get “camera ready” advertising composed mostly with Comic Sans and Hobo… and created in MS Publisher. Or better still… PowerPoint.
@ruouttaurmind Power Point isn’t actually that bad since you can actually kinda sorta layout on it… there’s no grid or line height or anything mucking with things. The shit people come up with in MS Word though…
The worst part is when people send me ‘vector’ artwork and it’s a low resolution bitmap pasted into Illustrator and exported as an AI or EPS file.
@jbartus We request camera ready stuff be PDF, or alternately ID or PS/Illustrator files. When forced, we’ll accept Quark files. We’re constantly fighting the battle of PDF files that are actually flattened low res RGB JPEG images, usually consisting of watermarked clip art pilfered from the Interwebs, then converted to PDF with SodaPDF or some other free tool.
Even if the original JPEG is a decent res, inevitably we’ll be asked to change something. “My designer is on vacay” or in jail or too expensive or whatever. Sorry folks! Can’t edit a raster image. Usually it’s phone numbers, event dates, etc. and we can get away with placing a text box over the old info. Matching font colors and background colors can be a challenge though.
@ruouttaurmind I’ve fallen into the habit of having stuff vectored in India for $5-10 per design and going from there. They have no compulsion about watermarks and I couldn’t work for that kind of money so it’s a win-win-win. I don’t have to do ripoff art, Indians make money, client pays a low price.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I old enough to have learned typing on a typewriter, so old habits of double spaces remain. Given the writing skills of people these days, and lack thereof, I think this is the least of our worries.
@narfcake When the millennials get into power and decide to write in all emoji, I’m glad I’ll be long dead.
(Ignore the missing ‘am’ in the above post. It was 3-ish in the morning - I should not have been posting and should have just been blamed @sammydog01 instead that I got woken up.)
@looseneck It’s already happening; reference /emojify.
@narfcake
Naw. I woke up too. Post away. Sleep-typing is the best.
@narfcake all of my friends use bitmoji. Unfortunately, my phone doesn’t run iOS 8 so I can’t download it ;-;
Ain’t done that since word processors started handling spacin automagically .
@cranky1950
if only these miracle machines could handle literacy automagically.
@f00l They try like hell, takes real effort to overcome auto-correct
@cranky1950
I was thinking of the sort of literacy that occurs within the mind, not the auto-correct typing sort.
Don’t think they make a machine for that one yet.
@f00l They are working on it, sometime in the next 20 years my job is supposed to go away.
@cranky1950
Is the alleged literacy that kills your job supposed to occur in AI or similar tech, or in a new generation of humans? Hmmmm.
Nothing against younger biological units here, but given the direction of educational funding, I have more faith in literate tech.
@f00l AI tech is supposed to advance to the point where doc writers will be replaced.
@cranky1950
Then, I guess, write fast?
OK, that was in poor taste. But I’ve no idea what to say, except, sux sux sux.
I wonder what the quality of our Brave New Manuals and Brave New Docs will be?
@f00l Eh the new economy. We have shit, quality is a nefarious concept. Look at the quality of textiles let alone heavy goods. No one much cares as long as there is some form of pablum to keep them entertained. The present generation thinks it has always been this way. But there are selfies and TMZ. This website is part of that. Don’t beat yourself up. Fuckin Alvin Toffler was more right than he ever expected.
@cranky1950
Toffler and Mrs Toffler were given iPads by the kids. They admitted to an interviewer, with humor, that they never tried them out.
I learned double spacing wasn’t accepted anymore, so I changed. It was the easiest change I ever made. I actually like the single space because it takes less time.
@arysta it doesn’t take less time for me, because i still type the double space and then have a sentence later have to scroll back and delete the 2nd space.
I do it. Other people don’t. I don’t care if they do or don’t. I don’t understand why they care if I do or don’t.
@craigthom You are Flunked
I don’t think I’ve done double space since high school. And I’m no youngin’. But I was an early adopter of computers, so maybe I just went with the program.
I still do it out of habit sometimes but I’ve tried to stop. My wife does a significant amount of writing (doctoral thesis and grant writing) and she has moved away from double spacing completely. In my everyday life of writing emails and such it really doesn’t matter. In her everyday life it matters significantly more.
Depends on what you are writing and the writing guide being used for that publication - seriously
If I am writing courseware or a presentation I do it for readability. After reading all this I see when I publish I will have to not do it.
And I always put the period or comma outside the parenthesis - fuckin’ A!
@kc5rbq You rebel!
The last time I remember being told to double space was in college a number of years ago. I think I might of used it briefly in emails… But I think the practice has been lost on me now.
Not my style. I did do it once or twice in college when trying to make my papers longer!
Also did the thing where you make the periods a bigger font. #iaintgottimeforthis
I double break line instead.
Yes, I really do.
I do…
@ELUNO
You do, you do, you do,
Zippity-do-da, you do!
I was not sure, but just checked something I typed a short while ago. Yes, double space after period! Old habits die hard, I guess…
I do unless I’m typing in a form field with a character limit. I also always use the Oxford comma. They both make reading easier.
Edit: Seems as though the meh forums strip out the extra space. See? I typed two there and it looks like one.
@medz
I think they auto-format to proportional formatting. Which is technically kinda sweet.
@medz Most RIP programs do the same thing.
@medz Nope, it’s good ol’ HTML that does that. Check it out, your space is still in the page’s source:
…but HTML knows that double spaces are the work of the devil. Well, that’s not exactly true, I suppose, it’s more just the idea that content and rendering are separate. There are likely good historical reasons for this as well, from HTML’s SGML/GML ancestry. The spec has this tongue-twister to offer:
@medz Big fan of the serial comma!
@brhfl HTML is dumb. So suck on that.
Yay! It worked! Double space FTW! Now to create a keyboard shortcut/macro…
@medz Noooooooooooo! In seriousness, though, I waste a lot of time deleting s from content I’m given. Takes more effort than just deleting a space.
@brhfl I believe it also has to do with code formatting conventions, spaces are often used to indent code for legibility.
@jbartus Yeah, it comes in handy for that modern luxury, but that’s still just a separation of content and rendering. The HTML spec essentially says that your content is a big pile of words, to be rendered out by the client according to linguistic standards. This has stood the test of time, as we evolved past 80 characters and grew tab keys. But it’s really not difficult to trace it back to the late 60s/early 70s. Berners-Lee was an SGML dude. SGML, of course, was born of IBM GML, and by extension DCF, and SCRIPT. The concern at this point was less ‘how many spaces should I use for a tab!?’ and more ‘if I indent this at all, how many fires will the S/370 catch on?*’ Because of the rules it had to follow in order to turn into valid SCRIPT, GML had a lot of strict rules governing spacing…
…but at the same time, breaking up content was necessary for a complex, stylesheet-based document engine running on limited memory…
Enough disparity existed in the need for ways to transparently merge content broken apart in various ways, and the frustration over adhering to rules dictated by GML being a layer atop SCRIPT. When SGML was developed, those folks made damn sure that whitespace was flexible, a delimiter of words only, and here we are today.
One final note: even prior to this, the quoted GML spec lays out some sense of simply taking in content and applying linguistic conventions at the rendering stage:
…sigh.
*: Indentation?! “Start all lines at the left margin of the source document. There should be no leading blanks. Leading blanks cause the SCRIPT/VS .LB [Leading Blank] control word to be processed. Trailing blanks at the end of an input line are ignored.”
@brhfl
Good stuff. Thx.
How the hell have I never heard of this until now? Seriously. I have been out of the loop far too long.
I don’t and never have, but as long as people are consistent, I don’t care if they do or don’t. It’s the inconsistency that annoys me.
@AnnaB THIS! YES! Inconsistency sticks out much more obviously than just about any other formatting error. If it’s formatted “incorrectly” but done consistently, it still feels right. Just do the same freakin’ thing always and we’re all good!
No, I do not double space after sentences and never will. It’s quite archaic.
I do, I didn’t realize people don’t. I guess I’m old, damn that was hard to say
But that’s what I was taught in school!
you’re gay for my code
@MrsPavlov
One if my fav scenes. Have had major blowups w bffs/squeezes over style rules.
Only I’m always right, so let my nearest and dearest go blow themselves. They’ll recover and thrive, eventually.
Nope, never, no, please no, just stop it.
I’m in middle school so I generally don’t use double spaces, though I will when I have to lengthen an essay in English. I also tend to indent paragraphs twice and use an online thesaurus because screw English.
I’ve never done it and never will.
I gave up that practice when I stopped using a typewriter about 25yr ago
/giphy stop using a typewriter
I am one of the die hards. I truly believe that there should be two spaces after every full stop. Anyone who thinks otherwise is incorrect. Double spacing after final punctuation is just more elegant, wise, and delightful, don’t you agree? Millions of literary scholars can’t all be wrong.
@curtise It just looks like you are hiccupping between sentences
You do 2 spaces after a full stop if you want a line break on reddit…Otherwise who gives a flying fuck? Some invisible, meaningless character?
I used to be a die-hard advocate for two spaces, even inserting numerous
characters into my webpages to force them to render that way. It was the way I was taught back in typing class using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for the Apple ][. Then I read Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, which dramatically improved the look of my documents. The section “One Space Between Sentences” in the chapter on Type Composition finally convinced me I was being a stubborn fool about it. Who am I to think that I and my now long-retired elementary school typing teacher know better than the collective authority of professional typesetters? It took some time to convert a quarter century of typing habit, but it took a lot less time than I expected. Really, I think it was less than a week, and I haven’t looked back. I highly recommend the entire “book”, too. It is thorough and has dramatically improved the look of my documents, which I’d thought were already better than average.@jqubed
Thx for ref.
@jqubed their knowledge and teachings probably dated back to the typewriter days, especially if you were learning on an Apple ][
@jbartus And Butterick points out that if for some reason you’re using a typewriter or a fixed-width font which mimics a typewriter then you should still use two spaces between sentences there.
@jqubed right, because you don’t benefit from the kerning benefits of modern font technology on a typewriter or with a font designed to mimic one.
Yup - always do - always will. [space] [space] So there
When I was initially taught typing and Microsoft Word in middle school, we were told to use double spaces between sentences. Over my time at college I realized that people weren’t doing that anymore, so I just switched to a single space. I don’t really see a problem with either way. It should be a personal preference thing at this point.
@ninjaemilee
Typesetters, layout artists, editors, page and book designers don’t the “personal preference” approach that much. I suppose it makes work for them.
/giphy makes work
@ninjaemilee I suspect if you think back on it you’ll realize your teacher in middle school was older, probably 50s-60s at the point they were teaching you, and were still teaching typewriter practices to a word processing program audience.
@jbartus That actually makes sense. I think the lady that taught the “computer class” was middle aged at the time.
@ninjaemilee @jbartus are we talking about middle aged, middle ages, middle class, or just SHUCKING old?
can i get a year reference?
@ninjaemilee @Yoda_Daenerys I think the lady who taught mine retired by the time I finished elementary school, in 1995, so, yeah, might not have necessarily been keeping with the times. Even the Apple ][s we were using must’ve actually been pretty outdated by then.
@Yoda_Daenerys like late 30s or 40s. I don’t know for sure.
I learned 2 spaces in elementary and have used it since. Would’ve been nice if somewhere along the line a teacher retaught that it’s better as 1 space and the 2 was outdated from typewriters.
@katiebug510 yea, if teachers knew what HTML was
If I’m typing on a computer that automatically justifies on left and right, one space. If I’m typing on a typewriter or using center or left justification, two spaces.
@macdaddy1 what is a typewriter?
@Yoda_Daenerys
/youtube kids react typewriter
@Yoda_Daenerys
Typewriters are things you can use to put words on paper in a faster and more readable fashion than handwriting, esp for formal correspondence and longer documents, and traditional models will work just fine off grid for decades, assuming sufficient paper and ink ribbons.
I’ve never worked in graphics or layout, and was going on what I had been told decades ago.
I owe a special ping to @HemlockTea and some others. This thread has…possible…ejicated me somewhat.
/giphy out of date
@f00l
Kerning is your friend, let it do its job!
@jbartus
A good friend of mine used to do font design as a sideline.
I never told him my double-space secret.
@f00l probably best for your health.
@jbartus
Actually, my fonty friend was from the typewriter era and would have sympathized. He would have, simply and elegantly, explained himself in our shared technical and conceptual language.
And I didn’t hide my practices. The issue was a quiet one, never rose from the deeps.
@f00l you can’t fool me! I know you secretly hid it from him out of shame! It’s like when my dog avoids a room he knows he’s pooped in, he knew he did something wrong.
@jbartus
I actually didn’t hide the double-space-at-end-of-sentence practice from “fonty friend” because I didn’t realize it was any sort of issue. Thought everyone did it.
;
Speaking of possibly guilty dogs spozedly acting out their shame after a so-called “accident” .,
You tried to shame me on “curiously-sourced” citations early in this thread. Hmmm. The shaming activity didn’t work so well. I have a new special “spurious citation” policy just for you.
See early in thread for details of the new policy update. Effective immediately. No appeals.
@f00l I was teasing. I am also completely lost on your latter portion of this message.
@jbartus
I know you were teasing. The penalty for that is eternal torment
/giphy eternal torment
Re: 2nd part of my earlier message, here is the response you missed:
And I quote:
…
"@jbartus
Ya know, if that’s your attitude, then next time I pull a citation outta my ass, I’m gonna arrange for you to be the one who wipes it off before I publish it.
Cheers!
f00l said Saturday at 8:51 AM"
…
Again, effective immediately. No appeals.
@f00l I didn’t miss it, I just didn’t see fit to dignify it with a response.
@jbartus
Glad you love it. Nothing dignifies like dignity!
/giphy proportional font
@f00l giphy represents true story.
@jbartus
/giphy Kern thyself!
Now let me see if I can locate a citation.
Hang on just a min here…
@f00l O.o what animated film are they watching there?
@jbartus
Film? Tv? Game? Not sure.
/giphy Not Sure
/giphy lacks citation
@f00l it seems like it may be the Telltale Game of Thrones game by looking it up on Giphy and seeing the tags.
Art style seems correct.
@jbartus
The animated haircuts don’t look faux-fantasy-medieval. I would not have guessed, just from that.
@jbartus
/giphy Jerome Kern font
I realized a while back I had mostly switched to one space after a period. Don’t know how it happened. But I’m chaotic about this. It seems to depend on how long my brain pauses while forming sentences. Sometimes it just feels right to hit the spacebar twice, and I have to do it.
I try to use two spaces after a period in source code (on the rare occasion I’m writing full sentences there – code comments or HTML content). I’m not sure it actually makes a difference in readability for monospace fonts, but hey, why not use two spaces when you can get away with it. When it’s HTML content I’m writing, it still works out because browsers remove the extra space when they display it.
I was cured of putting two spaces after a period when I got my first job in advertising. One space looks a lot tighter in layout. If I’d use two in the copy I’d write, the art director would give me a hard time because he or she would have to take out all those extra spaces.
The art directors had it even worse, though. If they used two spaces, a heavy from the typography department would march upstairs to the 43rd floor (well, they’d usually take the elevator because they were heavy) and give them a jolt with a cattle prod. That’d get anyone out of the two space habit right quick.
That, of course, was in the late '90s – not quite the golden age of advertising. More like the styrofoam age of advertising.