Double space now an error.

[Kerrybuchanan]

With my IT consultant hat on, It's called "regular expressions". Most modern wordprocessors support them in some sort of advanced mode on search/replace, and they allow incredibly sophisticated processing, combined with the readability and intuitive simplicity of quantum theory mathematics. Fortunately, whenever I'm trying to do that sort of thing, a bit of googling for how to replace X with Y except when there's a Z in the month usually finds a whole slew of answers that someone else has figured out and probably spent hours of screaming frustration knocking the kinks out of.

Can we do that one more time, please, but in English?

I do get what you're saying, but I haven't managed to use it -- yet!

And @Astro Pen, I must have missed that post, or I'd have given it a big thumbs-up. If it turns out that I did give a thumbs-up, then I'm pleading old-age memory loss...

 

[Pyan]

I believe UK publishers switched to single quote in WWII to save paper and ink.

I was also taught to use double at school, and still use it when writing long-hand.

Me too - "double for speech, single for 'quotes' inside doubles".

But, to be fair, I often use singles because you have to use the shift key to get doubles. Why aren't doubles on the same key as singles, relegating the @ symbol to shift 2? It works for colons and semicolons being on the same key...

 

[-K2-]

Me too - "double for speech, single for 'quotes' inside doubles".
But, to be fair, I often use singles because you have to use the shift key to get doubles. Why aren't doubles on the same key as singles, relegating the @ symbol to shift 2? It works for colons and semicolons being on the same key...

That sounds like a lot of double-talk. Seriously though, I don't understand what you meant in the bolded points.

K2

 

[Pyan]

Ok - : and ; are on the same key.

" and ' are on separate keys, on opposite sides of the keyboard. Why not put them on the same key, and move @ to above 2 on the top row?

Edit - duh! That's exactly how an American keyboard has it. British keyboards are different, so of course my post would make no sense to you, K2...

British and American keyboards

 

[-K2-]

Ok - : and ; are on the same key.

" and ' are on separate keys, on opposite sides of the keyboard. Why not put them on the same key, and move @ to above 2 on the top row?

Edit - duh! That's exactly how an American keyboard has it. British keyboards are different, so of course my post would make no sense to you, K2...

British and American keyboards

I told ya', "Merican gud."

K2

 

[.matthew.]

Me too - "double for speech, single for 'quotes' inside doubles".

But, to be fair, I often use singles because you have to use the shift key to get doubles. Why aren't doubles on the same key as singles, relegating the @ symbol to shift 2? It works for colons and semicolons being on the same key...

Don't forget about the double quotes inside the single quotes inside the double quotes

It's been said about the US keyboard layout, but you could always just set your keyboard to think it's a US one. There's no noticeable difference except for the pound sign and you'd get what you want for easy quote key.

Edit: while I kind of agree with you on the "it'd be better" thing. I do get a certain mental bump when I have the do the SHIFT+2 to start and end a quote. It actually helps me differentiate it from the rest of the text. Placebo's for the win...

 

[Biskit]

Can we do that one more time, please, but in English?

I do get what you're saying, but I haven't managed to use it -- yet!

And @Astro Pen, I must have missed that post, or I'd have given it a big thumbs-up. If it turns out that I did give a thumbs-up, then I'm pleading old-age memory loss...

I've used them a fair bit over the years, but it's best to think of them like dental work - once the root-canal is done, the pain stops, but getting there is stressful and requires a lot of anaesthetic.

 

[Parson]

Edit 2: Another rant. Must be a day for it. People who use tabs to indent the first lines of their paragraphs instead of setting up a first line indent from the beginning. Or, believe it or not, their spacebar! Nothing makes me crosser. I'll probably think of something else that does make me crosser in a minute.

Ah, but Kerry that all depends on what you are writing. If it isn't only text then having that automatic indent can be a real pain. I used that for a while but when I'd go back to edit my notes, or if I wanted to put in something without indenting it was a pain to change. I eventually stopped using and am happy for it. When I'm typing manuscripts I used to always use the tab key, but in the past few years i stopped doing that as well because it had became problematic. When I wanted to paste some of my text into PowerPoint slides the tabs fouled everything up and took a bunch of frustrating editing. It seems to me that if you are not typing for publication there are often reasons for what seems like a poor choice in formating.

British keyboards are different, so of course my post would make no sense to you,

What?! That is news to me. When you buy a computer do you have to choose a British keyboard?

But most computers can reassign functions to keys. --- A couple of reassigned keys really helps to keep people from appropriating your computer.

Back to where this started. I had to completely retrain myself to stop putting two spaces at the end of sentences. I did accomplish that, and I wouldn't go back. One reason? It saves a lot of keystrokes. A second reason, two spaces looks like a lot of wasted space. A third reason, printers produce copy which is easy to read without the obvious break between sentences, which I was led to understand was the reason for the rule in the first place.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Ah, but Kerry that all depends on what you are writing. If it isn't only text then having that automatic indent can be a real pain. I used that for a while but when I'd go back to edit my notes, or if I wanted to put in something without indenting it was a pain to change. I eventually stopped using and am happy for it. When I'm typing manuscripts I used to always use the tab key, but in the past few years i stopped doing that as well because it had became problematic. When I wanted to paste some of my text into PowerPoint slides the tabs fouled everything up and took a bunch of frustrating editing. It seems to me that if you are not typing for publication there are often reasons for what seems like a poor choice in formating.

That makes total sense. For clarity, though, I use ‘styles’. I have a style called ‘body text’ which puts everything into TNR, 12 pt, double spaced, 1st line indent because that’s what most publishers ask for. If I need to change anything for a publisher with different requirements, I set up a new style in e.g. Courier, no indents, extra big spaces after paragraphs, or whatever they ask for, then apply to the whole document.
I’ve spent the last few weeks editing an anthology that includes around 30-40% poetry, so the poems got a different style to the prose, but using tailor-made heading styles meant I could create a one-click Table of Contents once I’d finished.
I think I’m just very lazy and can’t bear doing extra editing when the machine can do it for me. Coupled with mild OCD...

 

[Vladd67]

@Parson when you buy a computer or keyboard in the UK it tends to come with a British keyboard by default. but then there are other types, a friend of mine works in the nuclear power industry for a French company and so even though he is based in an office in the UK the French company supplies the keyboards which all come with the AZERTY layout.

 

[Parson]

@Parson when you buy a computer or keyboard in the UK it tends to come with a British keyboard by default. but then there are other types, a friend of mine works in the nuclear power industry for a French company and so even though he is based in an office in the UK the French company supplies the keyboards which all come with the AZERTY layout.
View attachment 63622

Have mercy! I would go crazy trying to type on that keyboard! Switching the A and Q around is beyond the pale and I would have to say the same thing about the W and Z switch. I'm less antagonistic toward the right hand changes. Having to deal with um louts and the like, some changes are certainly needed. The ordinary (and I now understand I have to add the word American) keyboard in its placement of so many of the vowels on the second row, is just dumb when it comes to looking for the most efficient and probably most rapid way of typing. (The story I've heard is that the keyboard was laid out this way so that the best typists would have to slow down and not cause the keys to jam so much.)

 

[-K2-]

All these keyboard differences are disconcerting considering I went for years never realizing the trouble with
my handwriting was that I kept using a left-handed pen. Thankfully, they only make pencils right-handed.

K2

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

At my age, doing a search and replace at the end of a document is going to be a lot more easy than breaking the habit of more than fifty years.

 

[Ursa major]

I always type with double spaces at the end of a sentence. I never learned to type on an old typewriter so it's not a hang over from that, it's just something that to me looks right

Same here... though I also tend to put two spaces after a colon.

As to the article, is this really a new thing? In Word 2013 (and I think earlier versions, but 2013 is itself quite a long time ago), File>Options>Proofing>Grammar Settings>Spaces required between sentences, one is given the choice of "1", "2" and "don't check".

​

As an aside... Not quite three decades ago, I noticed that the new department secretary put three spaces at the end of her sentences. When I asked her about this, she said that this was what a previous employer insisted on this. (I can't recall if the employer was a private company or some sort of official body, but I think it may have been the latter.)

Me too - "double for speech, single for 'quotes' inside doubles".

Again, same here... although I would add that this is recursive if one writes sentences (I'm sure there must be at least one context which would require this, but I'm not sure what it might be) that have quoted speech inside quoted speech inside quoted speech, etc.

 

[Pyan]

I can remember a friend of mine typing up her thesis for her M.A., and complaining bitterly that it took longer to apply all the requirements for the layout, footnotes, spacing, etc, than it did to write the !@#$%^&* thing in the first place...

 

[Ursa major]

Ah, but Kerry that all depends on what you are writing. If it isn't only text then having that automatic indent can be a real pain. I used that for a while but when I'd go back to edit my notes, or if I wanted to put in something without indenting it was a pain to change.

In Word, if the default setting is to have a first line indent for paragraphs but one wants to remove the indent on one or more individual ones, all it requires is that one places one's cursor between the indent and the first character on the line and use the backspace key.

For clarity, though, I use ‘styles’.

Way back in the past, when I knew even less about what I was doing than I do now, I believed that a manuscript ought to be laid out in the same fashion as a published novel, and so adopted the "first paragraph of a chapter/section is not indented" approach. To make this easier to implement, I had a separate paragraph** style for first paragraphs.


** - I make most use of Word's "character" styles now, literally using them for tagging each PoV's narration, as I prefer these to take some account of each PoV's vocabulary and... well... character, in the same way (although not as clearly marked) as one would with their dialogue and thoughts. (I guess that with my (assumed) OCD, it's not quite as mild as yours....) Note that this is a character style, not a paragraph style, as a paragrpah can, obviously, contain both the PoV's narration and another character's dialogue.

 

[Parson]

In Word, if the default setting is to have a first line indent for paragraphs but one wants to remove the indent on one or more individual ones, all it requires is that one places one's cursor between the indent and the first character on the line and use the backspace key.

I used WordPerfect from 1989 to 2017 nearly exclusively. I knew my way around formatting in that program pretty well. So, I could do tricks in it that most people would say "I didn't know you could do that." I slowly migrated to Word mostly out of self defense. It seemed that almost everyone who sent me attachments would send them in Word. And because most of us Parsons were our own secretaries, and not very good ones at that. Most had no idea about things like pdf's. Now that I'm buying all my own software a double buy is not only redundant but also expensive.* So when I try to format things in Word which would take about 2 seconds for me in WordPerfect it's a major frustration. Although, I knew the above trick for Word (now!) when I was regularly making PowerPoints I was copying from WP and that didn't work that way. And the whole Style thing still makes me pull my hair out. I struggle to set up my own margins (I don't recall ever accomplishing it), I always end up picking one of THEIR styles. And don't get me started on the inane way Word handles two documents! (Parson takes a deep breath, he's about ready to rant.)**

*The church didn't buy two word processors either, or at least not precisely. I was reimbursed for my purchase of WP, and Word came bundled with the PowerPoint which we began using about 2010 for worship visuals.

**And to be fair to Word, I did spend hours in 1989 and 1990 in a work book for using WP, and I've done nothing similar for Word. Similar investment might indeed yield similar ease of use.

***Still, I've never seen a feature in Word that compares to WP's "Reveal Codes" which let's you get behind the WSIWYG and be able to deal with the codes calling for bold or whatever.

 

[Pyan]

***Still, I've never seen a feature in Word that compares to WP's "Reveal Codes"...

Sounds like something a D&D Mage would use when examining the parchment found in the mysterious coffer...

 

[Parson]

Sounds like something a D&D Mage would use when examining the parchment found in the mysterious coffer...

I've never played D&D but it did sometimes seem like magic.

It's the greatest tool I've ever used to discover why a piece of your work was not formatted in the appropriate way. When using it your whole text looks like the boxes [/QUOTE] we use when we edit in this forum's word processor. Another very powerful feature (which I'm pretty sure is available in WORD but I haven't discovered how to do it) is the ability to create your own keyboard macros. For example I wrote a macro which would put insights, comments, or sources in my personal texts like this: (), by hitting CTRL and the , button simultaneously I would put the (), with the cursor between the parentheses and a space after the , thereby saving myself 5 keystrokes every time I used it. And I used it a lot.

 

[KiraAnn]

Regarding the posts about regular expressions and combining with the post about changing single quotes to doubles but not apostrophes:

s/\w’|[.,?!]’/“/

That’s a Perl style regency which would handle most cases.