Spacing between sentences?

ERD50 said:
... there is some code in the source of the web page that tells it to strip out consecutive white-spaces.
Click to expand...
Yes, there must be, since in some circumstances, multiple spaces are preserved. But in ordinary text (not, e.g., inside "code" tags), multiple spaces will be lost each time your local browser reformats the lines for display. I've just satisfied myself that is so by saving your post as an html file, editing it on my local system by adding some multiple spaces, then displaying that with my browser. The multiple spaces disappeared on screen. So I really think the only feasible method will be to trick the system, somehow.
 
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kombat said:
Look at the HTML source code. It's probable that LibreOffice "knew" that you intentionally wanted all those extra spaces, so it replaced them with HTML " " (code for non-breaking space) characters in the HTML source file. Browsers will respect the special   character (likewise with using the <br> tag to force a line break). ...
Click to expand...

OK, so I'm learning some things here. I thought the html file was very basic, but I opened in a plain text editor, and I see that LibreOffice did add a lot of formatting overhead:

Code: 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Math/DTD/mathml2/xhtml-math11-f.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><!--This file was converted to xhtml by OpenOffice.org - see http://xml.openoffice.org/odf2xhtml for more info.--><head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/><title xmlns:ns_1="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" ns_1:lang="en-US">- no title specified</title><meta xmlns:ns_1="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" name="DCTERMS.title" content="" ns_1:lang="en-US"/><meta name="DCTERMS.language" content="en-US" scheme="DCTERMS.RFC4646"/><meta name="DCTERMS.source" content="http://xml.openoffice.org/odf2xhtml"/><meta name="DCTERMS.creator" content="ERD50 "/><meta name="DCTERMS.issued" content="2011-10-20T08:56:50" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF"/><meta name="DCTERMS.contributor" content="ERD50 "/><meta name="DCTERMS.modified" content="2011-10-20T08:57:52" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF"/><meta xmlns:ns_1="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" name="DCTERMS.provenance" content="" ns_1:lang="en-US"/><meta xmlns:ns_1="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" name="DCTERMS.subject" content="," ns_1:lang="en-US"/><link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCTYPE" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCAM" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcam/" hreflang="en"/><style type="text/css">
	@page {  }
	table { border-collapse:collapse; border-spacing:0; empty-cells:show }
	td, th { vertical-align:top; font-size:12pt;}
	h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { clear:both }
	ol, ul { margin:0; padding:0;}
	li { list-style: none; margin:0; padding:0;}
	<!-- "li span.odfLiEnd" - IE 7 issue-->
	li span. { clear: both; line-height:0; width:0; height:0; margin:0; padding:0; }
	span.footnodeNumber { padding-right:1em; }
	span.annotation_style_by_filter { font-size:95%; font-family:Arial; background-color:#fff000;  margin:0; border:0; padding:0;  }
	* { margin:0;}
	.Standard { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:page; }
	<!-- ODF styles with no properties representable as CSS -->
	{ }
	</style></head><body dir="ltr" style="max-width:8.5in;margin-top:0.7874in; margin-bottom:0.7874in; margin-left:0.7874in; margin-right:0.7874in; writing-mode:lr-tb; "><p class="Standard">01 spaces. Next
</p><p class="Standard">02 spaces. *Next
</p><p class="Standard">06 spaces. * * *Next</p></body></html>

But I don't know enough to know what that means. I don't see the " " you mention, but it looks like the <p class="Standard"> may be telling it to preserve the spaces?




GregLee said:
Yes, there must be, since in some circumstances, multiple spaces are preserved. But in ordinary text (not, e.g., inside "code" tags), multiple spaces will be lost each time your local browser reformats the lines for display. I've just satisfied myself that is so by saving your post as an html file, editing it on my local system by adding some multiple spaces, then displaying that with my browser. The multiple spaces disappeared on screen. So I really think the only feasible method will be to trick the system, somehow.
Click to expand...

Yes, I convinced myself of that when I looked at the source (right click 'view source') on my post #2 - the spaces are there in the source, it isn't the post editor that strips them out, but something in the way it is tells the browser (or doesn't tell it) to display the spaces.


-ERD50
 
1. On the iPhone app, all the spaces are still there.

2. You guys have spent way too much time on this issue -- and that's coming from me, the grammar policeman.
 
kombat said:
But all this is really trying to "trick" HTML into doing something it was never intended to do.
. . . There are tricks that let you specify those kinds of things, but you're not supposed to.
Click to expand...
Like the "helpful" photocopy machine: Put a note on the platten, hit the green button. The machine won't copy--for reasons only it knows--"incorrect paper size", "Select desired paper source", "LP1 Error,"
etc.

JUST MAKE THE $%*&@ COPY LIKE I ASKED YOU TO!
 
TromboneAl said:
2. You guys have spent way too much time on this issue -- and that's coming from me, the grammar policeman.
Click to expand...
I couldn't disagree with you more. There is enough ugliness in the world without adding to it with incompetent typography. Many very talented designers over the last centuries have labored to make beautiful books. Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming, devoted a substantial part of his later years to the engineering and the aesthetics of the distribution of white space in text.
 
samclem said:
Like the "helpful" photocopy machine: Put a note on the platten, hit the green button. The machine won't copy--for reasons only it knows--"incorrect paper size", "Select desired paper source", "LP1 Error,"
etc.

JUST MAKE THE $%*&@ COPY LIKE I ASKED YOU TO!
Click to expand...

That wasn't a Federal Reserve 'note' you were trying to copy, was it? ;) (see the other thread on not accepting cash).

I understand that copiers, printers and scanners have some built in detectors for money, and will refuse to scan/print it. Giving a detailed error message might not be the best security. Let people blame the Windows driver! :LOL:

-ERD50
 
ERD50 said:
I understand that copiers, printers and scanners have some built in detectors for money, and will refuse to scan/print it.
Click to expand...

That's true. Also, recent versions of Photoshop will not let you work with currency.
 
Back when I was a young 'un typing class was mandatory in the 9th grade. We started out on the manuals and, when we got pretty good, progressed to the electric typewriters. One wrong tap on the space bar could send you into extra-spaces neverland. Then you had to back up and the timed words per minute went all to [-]hell[/-] dickens. I'm not sure typing is even offered in junior high / high school any more.

As for me, I'm a one-spacer between sentences. It's what I learned and how I type today.

(On a side note: remember getting through the typing lesson early and getting to play with the "go over 15 spaces and type seven 'b's...." to make a pretty cool drawing?)
 
Here’s an opinion (here)
Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably [FONT=&quot]wrong[/FONT].
Click to expand...
To back up this judgment he references typographers.
The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the [FONT=&quot]The Complete Manual of Typography[/FONT], points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing. Hundreds of years ago some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after.
Click to expand...
His conclusion
But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one space over two. One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually pleasing (it also requires less work, which isn't nothing). A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.
Click to expand...
 
MichaelB said:
Here’s an opinion (here)
To back up this judgment he references typographers.
A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

But aesthetics, by definition, are subjective. One could just as easily argue that a page of text formatted with paragraphs looks "riddled with holes," whereas a page devoid of paragraphs looks "just as it should."

I'm a 2-spacer. It's how I learned, and I don't care enough to fight muscle memory and try and change it.
 
Ligatures. We has them.

(it's a typesetting geek thing, used to represent common multi-glyph sequences with a typographically correct compound glyph. Period-space is a ligature in some typefaces.)
 
MichaelB said:
James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
He should have read his reference more carefully.. Here is what Felici says about what you should do on a typewriter:
On a typewriter, using two word spaces after a period makes sense and is, in fact, typographically the right thing to do. That's because typewriters use monospaced typefaces, in which every character has the same width.
To Double-Space or Not to Double-Space... | CreativePro.com
Click to expand...
But when using a proportional font, as most of us do use when typing into a browser, Felici concludes:
Modern spacing aesthetics aside, the main reason not to use two word spaces (or an em space) between sentences is that people will think you're doing it out of ignorance.
Click to expand...
Now, whatever one thinks of two word spaces between sentences, using a proportional font, it is not at all what I'm talking about.. Above, I said that in print, a space intermediate between the space used between words and two such spaces was ordinary.. Not two word spaces.. In the little example I gave above, using a trick to get more space between sentences, I did not use two word spaces -- I used a word space plus the width of a period.. I've done that here, too (it's not that much work).. My other suggestion was to use an emoticon which displays as a narrow space.
 
RunningBum said:
I type in a post with the standard 2 spaces after a period, but then I look at it after submitting the post, and there's only a single period. It looks like it's happening to everyone. As a test, I'll put in 4 spaces after this sentence. Are there 4 spaces before this one?

It looks like the software is removing extra spaces, but 2 spaces between sentences is standard, not 1. I think 1 makes a longer paragraph a lot less readable. Can this be fixed?

I'm using Firefox 7.0.1 on Windows7.
Click to expand...

So..... have you gotten an adequate answer? If not, and to summarize the preceding posts, the forum software strips out the extras. You can use white characters if you really need more space but all that unoccupied space increases scrolling for

.
.
.
.
.
.

readers :D

:flowers:
 
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GregLee said:
But when using a proportional font, as most of us do use when typing into a browser
Click to expand...

Again, not to nitpick, but as a web developer, I just want to clarify one thing. Usually, when you're composing content for the web, you don't specify the font. You're just specifying the content. The font is up to the individual viewer's browser. They could specify whatever font they want for their "default" font, including a monospaced font like Courier New.

Now, again, of course you can force a particular font, size, colour, whatever on your content, so that you can be certain all your viewers will see your page in purple 12-point Verdana or whatever. But you're not supposed to, because visitors might have perfectly valid reasons for wanting the page to render using the font they've specified themselves, such as poor eyesight (they want text to appear in 18-point), colour blindness (they can't read purple text on a pink background), or maybe they're visually impaired and using a text-to-speech reader that doesn't recognize whatever font you've specified.

"Best Practices" of the web dictate that you should just provide the content, and let the end users' browsers handle the specific formatting and rendering. But thanks to CSS, people have gotten it into their head that the Web is just one big Microsoft Word document, and they want the page to look exactly the same in everybody's browser, on every platform, regardless of peoples' individual needs and preferences.

All that to say, unless you're violating best practices and explicitely specifying a typeface, then you can't be certain that your visitors are reading your text in a proportional-spaced font. They could be viewing it in a monospaced font.
 
Janet H said:
to summarize the preceding posts, the forum software strips out the extra [periods]
Click to expand...

I'm still not convinced that's the case. I think it's the browsers doing any space-compression that may be occurring. Different browsers (and even different versions of the same browser) handle formatting unpredictably, and can even vary based on user preference settings.

I still don't think the forum software has anything to do with it. I'm pretty sure your posts are just stored in a mySql database somewhere, exactly as you typed them, and faithfully regurgitated back to other viewers, where IE or Firefox or Safari or whatever makes a decision whether or not to render the 2 spaces you put after a period, or whether to squish them down to one.

EDIT: In fact, I just confirmed it. All of my posts have 2 spaces after every period. But when I see them here, there's only a single space. However, if I "View Source" and look at the actual HTML code that was delivered to my browser by the forum's PHP software, the double-spacing after periods is clearly there. So it's not the forum software. It's your browsers.
 
Now I'm worried that people on other forums are going to find out what we discuss all day, and make fun of us.
 
kombat said:
I'm still not convinced that's the case. I think it's the browsers doing any space-compression that may be occurring. Different browsers (and even different versions of the same browser) handle formatting unpredictably, and can even vary based on user preference settings.

I still don't think the forum software has anything to do with it. I'm pretty sure your posts are just stored in a mySql database somewhere, exactly as you typed them, and faithfully regurgitated back to other viewers, where IE or Firefox or Safari or whatever makes a decision whether or not to render the 2 spaces you put after a period, or whether to squish them down to one.

EDIT: In fact, I just confirmed it. All of my posts have 2 spaces after every period. But when I see them here, there's only a single space. However, if I "View Source" and look at the actual HTML code that was delivered to my browser by the forum's PHP software, the double-spacing after periods is clearly there. So it's not the forum software. It's your browsers.
Click to expand...

See my post #15 - I saw the same thing in the source code.

However, I'm going to disagree that the forum SW has nothing to do with it. When the forum software builds the page, it contains the codes (or defaults) to tell the browser what to do with consecutive white-spaces. So it appears to me that the forum SW could construct the pages such that it preserves consecutive white-spaces in the posts.

FWIW - I don't personally care about double-spaced sentences, but deleting the white-space sure screws up attempts to post columnar data, and I find the table thing to be far more awkward than just hitting the space bar.

Browsers should NOT be handling the formatting differently, they should be standards compliant.


-ERD50
 
kombat said:
... you can't be certain that your visitors are reading your text in a proportional-spaced font. They could be viewing it in a monospaced font.
Click to expand...
Well, I did say that most of us use a proportional font to type text into our browsers.

I don't think your "best practice" of delivering only content to your browser typifies what many of us actually do.. I supply many formatting commands along with textual content, specifying font, size color, list-type paragraphing, left vs. right alignment of paragraphs, and so on, and I see many others doing this, as well.
 
ERD50 said:
So it appears to me that the forum SW could construct the pages such that it preserves consecutive white-spaces in the posts.
Click to expand...
But according to what kombat just wrote (and despite what Janet says), the forum SW does preserve consecutive white-spaces.. Your browser removes them when it interprets the HTML for display on your computer screen.. If you mean that the forum software should construct the HTML it sends in such a fashion that the consecutive space characters you originally typed are displayed on your screen with twice the white space that a single space character gives, I suppose that would be possible by using the trick I demonstrated and changing some space characters into, say, "n"s, in invisible ink.. Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?
 
GregLee said:
But according to what kombat just wrote (and despite what Janet says), the forum SW does preserve consecutive white-spaces.. Your browser removes them when it interprets the HTML for display on your computer screen.. If you mean that the forum software should construct the HTML it sends in such a fashion that the consecutive space characters you originally typed are displayed on your screen with twice the white space that a single space character gives, I suppose that would be possible by using the trick I demonstrated and changing some space characters into, say, "n"s, in invisible ink.. Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?
Click to expand...

No, you are misunderstanding what I meant.

Yes, the forum SW does not remove them from what you type. And yes, the browser does not display them. But, the browser does so because it is following the commands (or lack of commands) that are listed on the page that the forum SW produces. I don't know enough about the details of html commands to know if this is the default, or if it must be stated explicitly to retain the spaces. But the contents of the page (produced by the forum SW) can specify to the browser if it should compress or retain the consecutive spaces.

No, I don't want any 'tricks' applied, I just want the forum SW to embed the command into the web page that it produces to tell the browser to display the consecutive white spaces as they were typed.

Here's a kind of pseudo-code representation, assuming that removing consecutive white-spaces is the default:

-------------

Do all the typical html overhead to present the page outline, headers etc,
Do the html to present the post header, author, etc

NOW - just before presenting the poster's text - send the command to preserve all white-spaces

/////poster's text goes here/////

turn off the command to preserve all white-spaces (if it would interfere with other displays)

-------------

That's all - just present the text the way the author typed it. Don't do any cyber-editing of it.


-ERD50
 
ERD50 said:
That's all - just present the text the way the author typed it. Don't do any cyber-editing of it.
Click to expand...
But the browser has to do cyber-editing, because it has to break up paragraphs into lines that will just fit into a box whose size differs depending on the dimensions you've assigned to your browser window.n As you watch some text, try resizing the browser window, and you will see how the text is "re-flowed" into new screen lines.n It's just what browsers do.n And part of the line breaking process (I mean dividing a paragraph into screen lines) is discarding of certain spaces, since after you have a screen line, you don't want to display any space that originally separated the first word of the line from the preceding word, nor a space that originally separated the last word of the screen line from the following word.

So the browser has to edit, and it has to discard some spaces.n You want to change the way it edits, so that it will display all of the sequences of spaces that wind up on the screen interior to a line.n Your proposal assumes that there is some global editing command available that tells the browser that.n I don't think there is.

Just for fun, I put two full word spaces between sentences in what I typed above, so we could see what your proposal, if it were feasible, would give us.
 
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