[MlMt] Any way to prevent auto-correcting two spaces after a period to one?

[Gary Hull]

On 8 Jun 2015, at 9:40, Eric A. Meyer wrote:

> On 7 Jun 2015, at 20:16, Gary Hull wrote:
>
>> On 8 Jun 2015, at 2:44, Ben Klebe wrote:
>>
>>> The autocorrect is system-wide in Cocoa text fields. To change it, 
>>> go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text and uncheck “Correct 
>>> spelling automatically.” Strangely though I can’t replicate this 
>>> behavior and furthermore why would you want two spaces after a 
>>> period?
>>
>> Please don't open that can of worms on the mailing list!:
>
> …he said, and then wrenched the can open further.

You noticed that, huh? :-)

>> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html
>>
>> Although I agree: two spaces after a period should have died with 
>> manual monospace typewriters.
>
> You and Manjoo are wrong: the wider post-sentence spacing was not a 
> quirky, transient artifact of typewriters or monospace fonts, but has 
> literal centuries of precedent and tradition behind it:
>
> http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

I worked in my middle school's print shop for a year setting lead type 
from a California case and redistributing the pi, so I know the 
traditions, and have read all the old pre-ITC typography books that are 
only available on ABE.com these days. I later worked as a graphic 
designer in a shop that went through the whole range of phototypography 
from hand-spaced display type to self-contained Compugraphic machines to 
Agfa-Compugraphic front-ends to Postscript imagesetters. Not to mention 
IBM Selectric Composers with Adrian Frutiger-designed fonts on 
9-to-the-em grids.

The point of books written for compositors is to teach compositors what 
to do. Writers didn't typeset their own books. Spacing decisions are 
made by the compositor, based on the font in use, the leading, and the 
particular letter pair. Today the function of the compositor has been 
taken over by the combination of the type designer and the particular 
system in which the font is realized (such as Postscript), which has all 
sorts of intelligence built into it, and additional intelligence built 
into the publishing software that drives the output (imagesetter or 
digital display). Again, the writer shouldn't be trying to force design 
factors like that in his manuscript (although click-to-publish bloggers 
have to assume some design responsibility). Fonts are no longer made of 
lead, you can kern without brass spacers, and you can negatively kern 
without filing off the lead corners of the font. The way that type looks 
today is the way that skilled typographers want it to work, and the best 
of them have simply better taste than the past masters. Old books just 
look blotchy to modern eyes, although they are beautiful as historical 
objects.

At any rate, double spacer should know that publishers these days have 
regex routines that manuscripts get run through, fixing things like 
initial and trailing spaces and high-bit ASCII, and that /\w+/\w/ or the 
like is built into such routines. So good luck getting double spaces 
into print at a proper publisher.

There was a period, I'll say mostly in the 1960s, 1970s, but also a bit 
before and after, when many low-budget publications, including many 
academic and scientific publications, published photographically reduced 
typed manuscripts. In other words, cheap typesetting was not available 
yet, and they couldn't afford typesetting. In these cases the style that 
writers had to follow specified "Elite" or "Courier," "double spacing" 
(two returns on the typewriter), the width of margins, the number of 
lines per page, manual justification (with double spaces to accomplish 
that, or half spaces, which some typewriters could handle, such as some 
Olympias), and so on. Universities had typing pools that could produce 
such manuscripts: They functioned as the typetting departments of these 
low-budget journals. In such manuscripts double spacing was often used 
after periods and other sentence-final punctuation, and then after other 
words if necessary to justify the text. People who learned typing in 
that era tended to use textbooks that specified double spacing. They 
were in effect learning half-assed typesetting. The factors that lead to 
that style no longer exist.