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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty obnoxious. I do two spaces out of habit, and would prefer it just removed them quietly rather than forcing me to relearn. (which is what HTML does, effectively.... it displays it the same if you use two spaces)

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Heck no, never knuckle under and allow the computer to take over. It's there to serve you.

Yeah I was forced to do this as a child when writing typed stuff in school and wish I hadn’t, hopefully won’t be too hard to relearn.

We were also forced to have perfect MLA citations in high school where the librarian had to sign off on it and you had to go rewrite it for any arbitrary little thing - what a monumental waste of time. They probably still make the students do that.

When I was in school they still had us using MLA but there were sites you could post any URL or book title and it would generate the citation for you.

Given the seeming inability of many people to gauge the voracity of primary sources, I'm not so sure the teachers were wrong in this case. I know I liked reading wikipedia and copying the sources from there, but there's something to be said for teaching exactly how unreliable a source is based on the inability to properly cite it.

That software didn’t work for us at the time because we had to follow some document provided by the school and what software did exist was often slightly different in the exact placement of punctuation.

I think that focus was a waste - when you really need to do that in graduate school it’s not hard to figure out and you can use software to do it.

They also made us put inline citations in the writing itself (you couldn’t even say the year someone was born without citing the source).

Of course the teachers didn’t actually look at the source and discuss its quality (which may have been useful) - they instead obsessed over minutia of where exactly a space or period is required in the citation and if it’s a periodical or website.

It's a setting in the grammar checker that has always been there. Just disable it again.

I use LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) which just silently ignores the second space (acting as if you hadn't pressed the key). I think this would be a better way for Word to do it than flagging it as an error.

The problem is that Word is a WYSIWYG editor, so it can’t ignore second spaces. It must affect the layout.

(FWIW, I think WYSIWYG editors are a bad hack and should be avoided wherever possible. Either use a semantic editor or a real page layout program.)

I don't think that's what WYSIWYG means. It simply means the display onscreen is what will be printed (or otherwise what others will see)

I think the GP is distinguishing between an ignored space and an ignored press of the space bar. The GGP was saying that in Lyx, the extra space in the source doesn't show up in there rendered document.

I think the GP was saying that a WYSIWYG editor can't ignore a space. I think the GP is saying a WYSIWYG editor could ignore a keypress and not insert the space, but if it puts a space in the source... it has to be in the rendered output, as there's little to no distinction between source and rendered output in a WYSIWYG editors.

Now, I think there's some middle ground, where a WYSIWYG editor could insert a zero-width space for the second space bar press, but I think that would be very confusing for most users and of very little practical benefit, even for power users.

if you were going to do that, i think you should render two half width spaces rather than a full width and a zero width, so the cursor still moves naturally.

Excellent suggestion. How could I have forgotten about half-width spaces?

This would only work when editing, not when typing it out the first time.

Sure, the first space would be full width, the second would be half width but would also cause the one before it to become half width. You wouldn't really see that there were half width spaces until you edit, but they are there as soon as typed.

I've started using Typora [1] recently. It's the best of both worlds.

[1] https://typora.io

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