Smart lazy kids adjust the kerning and slightly modify the margins.
Yep... as well as use fractional point sizes (so, you want the paper in 12 point? Hmm, would you notice if I made it 12.1 point?), leading/line spacing, lookalike fonts that are slightly larger than the recommended fonts, and all sorts of other tricks. I swear, I think I've used nearly every one of these tricks at some point.
I usually use emoticons in place of ending punctuation. An emoticon both denotes the end of a thought and adds context and meaning to the thought. Putting both an exclamation mark and :O at the end of a sentence is kind of redundant, unless you're going for that or your punctuation and emoticon each modify the sentence in different ways.
AP style guide says to "use a single space after a period at the end of a sentence."
However, double spacing at the end of a sentence has always been one of those stupid tricks kids taught each other to add a bit of length to essays and such. Still wrong, though.
The kids that did that always amused me as they would do that to add length and then use contractions in the essay.
A bit late to the discussion, but if there's one thing I learned from design school, it would be that aesthetics matter, even to the uninitiated. Whether it be pretty graphics, layout, typographic hierarchies, use of color schemes, appropriate font, etc., people respond better to good design. It is surprising how much people value appearance over content, but that is the foundation of marketing, esp. package design. People will remember the content of a presentation with good design more than the classic B&W, bullet point, bad font choice presentation, unless the speaker is exceptional. A thesis paper written in Comic Sans will, on average, not be taken as seriously as a paper written in a decent serif font (i.e. not Times New Roman). Is single space more aesthetically pleasing than double? I would venture so, as it affects the flow of the eye and of reading. The inconsistency of spacing mid-sentence versus post-sentence implies a more halting sentence flow. Mixing the two is even worse. MLA is awful. And so was typing this in the cold on an iPhone.
I think it's also very prevalent among Ruby devs. Every time I see rails/sinatra/etc code it's all double-spaced. Since I'm usually editing someone else's work, I deal with it, but there's still an unproductive double-take every time I do a newline. Bleh.
People can set the length of their own tabs to whatever the fuck they want, 2, 4, godly 3, or whatever-the-fuck-they-want. Tab is for indentation, to move the cursor a fixed distance from the left (or right) side, not spaces. A space is used to separate other characters (so fuck off with double spacing as well), not to indent, to tabulate, your shit. The width of a tab character can be adjusted in every text editor worth a bloody horsefuck. Thus the width of indentation becomes nothing more than a preference. A preference that differs between people.
By expanding your fucking tabs you force your shitty preference upon others, instead of having the common decency to let those others use their own shitty preference for how wide the god damned indentation must be, and you fucking ignore this whole thing called typography. You know, serious shit. It's not like your fucking editor suddenly starts treating your expanded tabs differently (if it does it's a god damned clusterfuck in a quarter-mile flat and you should put yourself out of your own misery, preferably by sucking my cock).
So unless you manually insert every fucking indenting space character yourself, in which case you're a god awful cunt in need of swallowing some whole horsecocks (horse attached optional, I'm magnanimous after all), do humanity a favour and don't fucking expand your tabs when you publish your shit to someone other than yourself. Just because you're suddenly a nerd doing such nerd shit like nerding out some source code, doesn't mean you can ignore typography. Hell, there's a bunch of languages that force you to use white space, not spaces, white space (like tab), if you want the code to work at all! So fucking do it proper you shit-stirring shadflies.
And fuck that argument from authority, Google should know better, they have all the god damned information on the freaking planet after all.
Tab as also acceptable.
NO IT IS NOT
Typography is serious. Just because you don't personally care about typography doesn't make it not important, and it doesn't mean it's ok to disrespect it or fuck it up once you know better.
Imagine someone who doesn't care about driving never using their turn signal. They say "how the fuck cares?" they don't care about driving, they just do it to get to work and back.
Well, you may not care about typography, but you are using it right now as you type. If you are going to engage in a practice, and you know better, you have no excuse not to fuck it up when the results of your work will be inflicted on others.
Typography is one of those things that matters a fuckton, but is completely invisible to people who don't know about it.
Well this is fucking surprising! I would never have bet my immortal soul on this happening the moment I opened this thread. Tab is the only acceptable character for indentation, get wrecked, you selfish fucking scrubs.
I only do double spaces when doing essays and academic work. On the Internet, I tend to be more lax and just use a single space between each sentence. It saves both time and space on the web page.
Ha. I just quadruple spaced this sentence. It makes zero difference in HTML how many spaces you use. I used 10 spaces for the previous sentence and 20 for this one.
Ha. I just quadruple spaced this sentence. It makes zero difference in HTML how many spaces you use. I used 10 spaces for the previous sentence and 20 for this one.
I'm still forced to see it if I hit "quote" on your post.
Ha. I just quadruple spaced this sentence. It makes zero difference in HTML how many spaces you use. I used 10 spaces for the previous sentence and 20 for this one.
I'm still forced to see it if I hit "quote" on your post.
It like you didn't even read Cremlian's post. But yeah, of course you see it in the textbox. Duplicate spaces don't get rendered, but the characters are still there to display in the textbox.
It's time consuming to hunt for every sentence break and remove the extra space when we're manipulating the text on a small scale.
Something is very wrong with your workflow if this takes you more than 30 seconds. Any competent text editor should be able to find-replace.
It's not ideal to have to always find-replace every time I open a doc. Used to be something I would just notice and correct as I went unless the doc was more than a couple pages. It's gotten to the point where the different raw sources we pull from are so inconsistent that I now always find-replace when I'm working with copy. Not something I ever thought I'd need to have on a checklist, but there you go.
Comments
Is single space more aesthetically pleasing than double? I would venture so, as it affects the flow of the eye and of reading. The inconsistency of spacing mid-sentence versus post-sentence implies a more halting sentence flow. Mixing the two is even worse.
MLA is awful. And so was typing this in the cold on an iPhone.
People can set the length of their own tabs to whatever the fuck they want, 2, 4, godly 3, or whatever-the-fuck-they-want. Tab is for indentation, to move the cursor a fixed distance from the left (or right) side, not spaces. A space is used to separate other characters (so fuck off with double spacing as well), not to indent, to tabulate, your shit. The width of a tab character can be adjusted in every text editor worth a bloody horsefuck. Thus the width of indentation becomes nothing more than a preference. A preference that differs between people.
By expanding your fucking tabs you force your shitty preference upon others, instead of having the common decency to let those others use their own shitty preference for how wide the god damned indentation must be, and you fucking ignore this whole thing called typography. You know, serious shit. It's not like your fucking editor suddenly starts treating your expanded tabs differently (if it does it's a god damned clusterfuck in a quarter-mile flat and you should put yourself out of your own misery, preferably by sucking my cock).
So unless you manually insert every fucking indenting space character yourself, in which case you're a god awful cunt in need of swallowing some whole horsecocks (horse attached optional, I'm magnanimous after all), do humanity a favour and don't fucking expand your tabs when you publish your shit to someone other than yourself. Just because you're suddenly a nerd doing such nerd shit like nerding out some source code, doesn't mean you can ignore typography. Hell, there's a bunch of languages that force you to use white space, not spaces, white space (like tab), if you want the code to work at all! So fucking do it proper you shit-stirring shadflies.
And fuck that argument from authority, Google should know better, they have all the god damned information on the freaking planet after all. Well this is fucking surprising! I would never have bet my immortal soul on this happening the moment I opened this thread. Tab is the only acceptable character for indentation, get wrecked, you selfish fucking scrubs.
Anyone who double-spaces after a period is actively waging a war on progress, on common sense, on basic human decency.
Anyone who teaches or encourages double-spacing in the school system is an agent of evil.
Never use more than once space for anything. Use proper indentation methods for anything else.
sed s/\. /\. / <file >newfileP.S. Luke you used 6 spaces, not 4.
Today's XKCD - relevant.