Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

The point of much punctuation is to help inform the parse, and understanding semantic intent. This is why I find the whole "two spaces after full stop not needed" thing to be a very odd argument: Those spaces aided reading. They had a purpose.

Quote blocks are embedded, nested structure. Sure seems to me like a punctuation model and a layout model which can understand that, is net beneficial.

I always liked the french <<this is a quote>> model. Somehow it felt more like an embedded thing.

Double quotes have the additional burden MICROSOFT WORD I AM LOOKING AT YOU of the random interpolation of what the editor YES MICROSOFT WORD I MEAN YOU thinks it knows you meant to say. Additionally hijacking the text into badly encoded iso-latin1 or utf-8 mis-parsed, as a free gift.

if I mean to say:

  “a quote” (left and right double quotation mark)

I will say it. When I say

  "a quote" (apostrophe, used twice)

please.. leave those quote-marks alone.

(double-dash to em-dash.. same problem: free uplift to UTF you didn't ask for)

> Those spaces aided reading. They had a purpose.

Did they though? When I read old books vs new books, I don't notice the difference at all. Especially with justification, spaces are already quite variable per line.

I don't think it aided reading at all. It was just a kind of random convention -- maybe somebody thought there was a logic to it -- that got dropped because it wasn't doing anything. One less rule to worry about.

A study showed that it's hard to measure any difference in reading speed and there is no difference in comprehension.

The difference in reading speed only applies to people who are used to double-spaces, there is no difference in reading speed single-spaced vs. double-spaced for people who are conditioned to read single-spaced.

> Although the type of spacing following punctuation marks did not seem to have an effect on those individuals who type with one space after a period, those who type with two spaces after a period had greater reading speed when paragraphs were presented in the same way in which they type: with two spaces following periods and one space following commas.

I'd argue this data suggests the double-spaces are a waste of space that accomplishes nothing except slightly handicapping people who become accustomed to it and then read text without it.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6

>slightly handicapping people who become accustomed to it and then read text without it.

Or maybe slightly boosting when reading double spaced? (I didn't read the article yet, my plane is just starting).

Books are typically not monospace, which is where the two-space rule really applies.

Yep, I use vimwiki where it's all monospace, and two spaces between sentences is a massive readability benefit there. I also type it when making comments here because these input boxes are also monospace, even though the extra space isn't displayed after posting.

No, the two-space rule was used in books a ~century ago. That's what I'm comparing with.

The habit was adopted for monospace typewriters precisely to try to match book typesetting.

Then the books dropped it, but it persisted in typing habits.

Then once Mac/Windows allowed anyone to use proportional fonts, we were taught to use a single space again.

They do. The end of a sentence is not the same as the space after an abbreviation. There is a semantic difference, and it's useful.

> I always liked the french <<this is a quote>> model. Somehow it felt more like an embedded thing.

Those « » characters are called "guillemets" [0]. Fun fact, they're named after an early French typecutter, Guillaume Le Bé!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet

No, they are the worst.

Guillemets require using space around them («wrong», « correct ») which makes typesetting so hard as you have to hunt for each guillemet that fell to the next line to manually fix it.

And even that's not possible on the web, so you have to get used to dangling punctuation.

Could you use non-breaking space instead?

Use non breaking spaces between the content and the guillemet...

In LaTeX it’s quite easy to change the kerning so that one needn’t leave a space in the plaintext. It’s akin to e.g. east Asian full-width Unicode punctuation marks, or even slightly dated English typography (when there was a little more space before most semi-colons).

That's also required with every punctuation symbol with two parts in French so : ; ! and ? also require an extra space.

You should use U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE for French punctuation spacing.

They don’t require a space around them. That’s a French thing. They don’t require that in Swiss German.

Also not in Norwegian and probably others.

I’m pretty sure there is a setting in Word that allows you to turn off the automatic conversion of quotes. And I think that defaulting to performing the replacement is sane, as most people do just type “"” whenever they need any quotation mark and cases where “curly” quotation marks are appropriate are much more common than straight-quote cases outside of tech-related contexts.

The '. ' is already wider than a normal space though, so personally I find it easy to parse both.

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