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

[Eric A. Meyer]

I'll offer my own but of insight: Butterick is right that it doesn't 
matter.  I just wish he and those who follow his view would take that 
advice to heart, and stop demonstrating to all and sundry that it really 
does matter to them.


On 7 Jun 2015, at 23:21, Ben Klebe wrote:

> 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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Eric A. Meyer - http://meyerweb.com/