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

[Gary Hull]

Well, I did say it was a can of worms. Let's discuss the positioning of 
periods and commas relative to quotation marks instead.

On 8 Jun 2015, at 12:46, Eric A. Meyer wrote:

> 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/
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