Slatest

[calimac]

1. Oh, great. Now we can blame Philip K. Dick for the Tucson shootings. Or Nietzsche. (Paging Otto West, Mr. "Don't call me stupid" from A Fish Called Wanda)

2. The Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms. She knows so little, she doesn't know that she doesn't know it, and she doesn't know that there are other people who do know it.

3. The Military-Industrial Complex. Contains something of a history of the idea that wars are caused by arms merchants seducing and bamboozling politicians into them. Doesn't go into the literary manifestations, though. I first came across this notion in Shaw's Major Barbara, in which Undershaft the arms merchant says that he and his peers decide when there'll be a war, for the sake of profit. I once read a reprint of early issues of Superman from the late 30s. In them, Superman spent most of his time beating up arms merchants who were trying to lead the US into war. That he didn't even bother thinking about, say, Hitler or the Japanese militarists is unnerving.

4. Here's a truly insane screed against putting two spaces after a period, and he'll have to take my cold dead thumb from the keyboard to stop me.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Here's a truly insane screed against putting two spaces after a period

But, um, he's right. Double-spacing after periods is an artifact of the monospaced typewriter era. With proportional fonts, a single space leaves an appropriate amount of space after a period. Really, putting a single space after periods is part of what makes text in any professionally printed book look professional. It's also true for most text you see on webpages, because HTML removes extraneous spaces (thank ghod).

Go ahead, type as many spaces as you like after a period when you write an LJ post. (I just typed 5 spaces there.) When it displays, you'll see one (1). And ghod and typographers meant it to be.

I've always been highly amused that the iPhone panders to the 2-space habit by allowing the shortcut that typing two spaces after a word will insert a period plus a space. Nice.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, he's insane.

Since, as you quite accurately point out, HTML removes extraneous spaces (if you want extra spaces to appear in the browser display, you have to encode them explicitly), then WTF does it matter how many spaces you type? Why should he care?

In the case of proportional fonts in word processors, double-spacing is still desirable. It really does affect the amount of space that appears in the document, and it's useful to distinguish the end of a sentence from the space after the period in an abbreviation like "St. Louis". If they're the same, I find it disconcerting.

That's if the document is not to be further edited. On occasion I've written documents which are to be professionally typeset by someone who's going to go over all the kerning with care, and they request me to leave only one space after sentences to assist them in their work. Fine; in that case it's quick-and-easy to make a global change after I write the document, without having to change my typing habits.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

He is correct. But I don't expect anyone to care but those of us who are publishing professionals or type geeks.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

He is correct for works being professionally published by careful typesetters. For ordinary everyday typing, he's wrong for reasons he himself points out, though he doesn't realize it.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Once I learned about it and retrained myself, I was delighted at how much better my documents looked. When I see text with the extra spaces, it looks ugly and wrong to me. I'm surprised that more people don't have the same reaction. (Yeah, yeah, why isn't everyone like us?! heh)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've retrained myself as well, after a discussion on a monospaced fannish list.

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

Framemaker (my current favorite for documentation) will only allow one space after any punctuation unless you enter hard spaces. You can change the override, but it's not advisable.

I'm with vggn. ;->

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

Insane is totally right.*

I think he's just jealous that Julian had a hot thing with a (gasp!) 19 yr old female.

So he has to focus on something else.

*I generally don't double space after a . nowadays, but I think I'll tweet this, and double space everything for a while.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I learned two spaces in junior high typing. When I got a job where it mattered, I was told one space, so I changed it. Now I design and typeset books and have to take out extra spaces all the time.

What's more irritating is people who try to design the book, and indent paragraphs themselves, using spaces.

If it could be taken for granted that the extra spaces would always go away automatically, I'd say go nuts. Have fun. Build up those thumb muscles.