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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thing is, living in Europe, AFAIR I never heard about "use two spaces" rule until now (even if in a long monospace plaintext, I might have subconsciously used it sometimes to disambiguate).

If I saw that in a Word document, however, I would have thought the author was a technically-illiterate person who puts extra spaces around commas, quotes, parentheses etc. or uses 10 spaces instead of 1 tab for indentation.

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Talking typography trivia: in French language, it's mandatory to put a space before "double-characters" like : ; ? ! - the side effect is that it often allows to easily recognize a French person online even if they write in English.

Most people: Hello! How are you?

French people : Hello ! How are you ?

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In German this is called Plenken [1] and if you're writing spaces before such double-characters, many people will think that you're not the smartest person. Angry comments under news articles often using this. Something this is called "Deppenleerzeichen" (idiot's space), but this is yet another thing in the German language [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita

In TeX or LaTeX the command to turn the extra space after the period on and off is called \frenchspacing. I remember this because the proof reader of my theses asked me why I had so inconsistent spacing between the sentences and told me that I should stick with a single space. I remember that I had little time to figure it out and that I was very happy when I found that the \frenchspacing command would do it.

I don't remember if \frenchspacing means extra space or no extra space though. Also don't remember if it is a TeX or LaTeX command, and therefore if Knuth called the option like that or if it is Lamport's invention.

\frenchspacing = single spacing

\nonfrenchspacing = double spacing (default)

They are both TeX commands.

So the French don't like too much space after punctuation but are keen on space before it. Typography is a weird thing.

While we're on the topic of typographical prejudice, I confess that if I see a Microsoft Word document at all, I tend to assume the author is not so technically literate.

The intersection of "people I've seen use Word" and "people who know how to write a program" is extremely small.

Are all the technical people you know eccentric Richard Stallman types? There’s definitely a subdemographic out there that would never touch Word, but out in the real world everyone (technical or not) uses word processors (almost always MS Word) to produce low effort documents.

Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long?

Reasons for technical people to use word:

1. A non technical person may need to edit or even just comment on the document at some point

2. It's stupid, but in a lot situations people are conditioned to take an email with the real content attached in a word doc more seriously than a plain email. You could use a PDF to the same effect but see point 1.

3. Actually imo it's the best tool for the job it's designed for. Markup/markdown and adobe have their places but not in everyday business writing. Or even scientific, it beats latex for journal papers imo (see point 1).

> Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long?

I don't know about the OP, but in the mathematics community you need to have a lot of confidence on yourself to write a paper in Word. It would be a much worse offense than using comic-sans, and it would likely be interpreted as a flamboyant deviation and unnecessary attention whoring.

Interesting.

I have once written for a journal that insisted on latex but can't say I found it a good way to work (and that's after plenty of experience with it including a phd thesis). I can see how it might be better for math heavy writing, especially 10 years ago, but most of the basic latex math commands work in word now anyway.

If that field frowns on word so much it should just insist on latex for paper submissions to save anyone the embarrassment, but people enjoy being dicks I guess.

A friend of mine is a physics PhD. Most journals require to use their exact LaTeX settings for every little detail in order to have an article published.

Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal.

Yeah, that's daft. Most journals I use now have a "your paper your way" policy for initial submissions and only require conforming to format requirements when it's near acceptance. I'm quite happy to use their latex template at that stage particularly if the journal is open access and not charging exorbitant fees.

> Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal.

What kind of menial work do you mean? Isn't that just a matter of changing the class of your document? Why would you need to change the text of the article itself?

I'm not GP but some journals have formatting requirements such as specifying which sections (e.g. introduction, background, methods, results, discussion) you must have and in what order. Also relative size of these e.g. how much background is expected? Word/page length limits both for the abstract and complete article. Nit picks like whether you refer to Figure 1 or fig. 1 in the text (and whether it's capitalized if not at sentence start). Usually if you reformat a bibliography to a different referencing style, even automatically, it needs checking as the database fields will have been used in different ways and often errors creep in. Different wording for competing interests and author contributions statements and maybe a different position for the former (in the main manuscript / a separate file). The list goes on...

Not to mention often the latex style (or word template) given often directly contradicts the author instructions page on the website.

Beyond LibreOffice, or the privacy-violating Google Docs, can I legitimately ask what word editing software you would suggest as an alternative?

I’ve never before head of the use of Microsoft Word as anything but professional.

I’m a senior iOS dev, I’ve been in iOS, web development, and more recently AR/VR, I’ve never used anything but, I’ve never been instructed to use anything but, and I’ve also had many a job where it was a requirement.

I think he is academic and he means something like LaTeX.

There is very little choice for nonprogrammers.

Word is not bad it's just editor. In skilled hands its fine. Actually the biggest typographic problems people make are not really because of Word but because default office paper sizes A4/Letter are too wide for one column. For optimal 60-70 characters per line you either need giant font size or two columns so they put people into quite difficult situation. Why this happened? Typewriters use monospaced fonts that are much wider and we switched to proportional typefaces but paper size stayed.

I learned to type when I was a kid (in Flanders), around the year 1985 or so (on a purely mechanical typewriter) and we learned to type two spaces after a period. Also I never learned to put a space before colons etc. I feel like I know the rule is to not do that, but I'm not sure where, if ever, I learned that rule.

In Belgium we use the same AZERTY keyboard layout with France (largely) but apparently the typographical rules vary widely.

I remember the two space rule driving me crazy when I used GNU typing tutor for learning touch typing. I ended up modifying the tutorial files to get rid of them.

I'm French Canadian and I usually avoid the space before those characters because they have a tendency to wrap on a new line by themselves. You are supposed to use non breaking spaces but most tools won't do it automatically, and they are not trivial to type.

IIRC alt-space inserts a NBSP utf8 character on macOS and Linux basically anywhere. It’s been too long since I used Windows but I recall something like that working (maybe only in some select software though).

Now the visual feedback though... It usually appears as a regular space.

> ... Linux basically anywhere.

Probably not in KDE, as that (by default) has alt-space bring up the Plasma "Search Bar".

I think you mean « French people : ... » I find the extra space much more common with the colon than with exclamation or question marks.

Ha, you got me - I was in non-French thinking mode until the colon - edited :)

When I did my Pitman typing qualifications in the UK in the late 90s, 2 spaces was mandatory. That is where I learnt it from, and still keep doing it to this day as muscle memory.

A lot of French people are aware of the difference when they write in English though.

I only just worked out that the two spaces I see in text that I format must invariably come from Word docs exported as text. I am from the eight bit era so I intuitively save bytes where I can.

Not only. Some of us just always type like that. In my case, I almost never use Word, so this change is not going to affect me.

First time I hear of it too, and that could explain how the "dot shortcut" (two spaces transforms into a dot followed by space) made it into the iPhone.

Not just French. I see it a lot from other non-native-english speaking cultures.

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