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

[Ben Klebe]

I can only offer this shrewd bit of insight from Matthew Butterick’s excellent Practical Typography: http://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences.html




"I know that many peo­ple were taught to put two spaces be­tween sen­tences. I was too. But these days, us­ing two spaces is an ob­so­lete habit. Some say the habit orig­i­nated in the type­writer era. Oth­ers be­lieve it be­gan ear­lier. But guess what? It doesn’t mat­ter. Be­cause ei­ther way, it’s not part of to­day’s ty­po­graphic prac­tice."


Sincerely,


Ben Klebe

On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 11:12 PM, Gary Hull <YH82d7dfU at yandex.com> wrote:

> 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.
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