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One Space, or Two?; Which is proper?
Topic Started: Jan 19 2011, 09:31 AM (1,011 Views)
JBryan
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I am the grey one
A close cousin to what Ax is talking about is the "check grammar" feature built into Microsoft Word. I had to turn that thing off because it seemed to be consistently wrong and often, frankly, stupid.
"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne


There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it".


Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody.

Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore.

From The Lion in Winter.
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sue
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HOLY CARP!!!
Aqua Letifer
Jan 19 2011, 10:20 AM

The other reason for the standard spaced font, in conjunction with the double spaces after periods and colons, is so that editors can easily and quickly identify the difference between colons and periods, and other punctuation marks. This also allows a manuscript to be read much easier and faster.

bingo.

If you are writing something you want people to be able read and understand, you make the effort, or you get binned.

Don't even get me started on the lazy arses who don't use paragraphs. That gets the delete button. Think of your audience, people.
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Aqua Letifer
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ZOOOOOM!
JBryan
Jan 19 2011, 11:33 AM
A close cousin to what Ax is talking about is the "check grammar" feature built into Microsoft Word. I had to turn that thing off because it seemed to be consistently wrong and often, frankly, stupid.
Wordpad. I write everything "important" with Wordpad only.

I use Word for making 1" margins and adding headers perhaps but I do the nitty gritty editing with a hard copy, a pen and my eyes.
I cite irreconcilable differences.
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KlavierBauer
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HOLY CARP!!!
AL: I suppose the software vs. human debate is a different discussion entirely, but I tend to agree with you (and I write software!). Software will always have some significant limitations, as it will (at least for the foreseeable future) not be able to recognize subtlety in the same way a human can.
There are still lots of things that humans can simply do better/faster/easier than computers.
"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper
"He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple

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Axtremus
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HOLY CARP!!!
Aqua Letifer
Jan 19 2011, 11:20 AM
Axtremus
Jan 19 2011, 11:11 AM
Just because some of us can only imagine software following relatively simple rules and perform relatively simple operations doesn't mean software will only ever follow relatively simple rules and perform only relatively simple operations.

1. Nothing prevents of known abbreviations from being bundled with software and consulted with the routines that determine how much white space to leave after a period.

You're not going to get them all, Ax, that's my point. Some may be specific only to a certain manuscript, chapter or paragraph.
Oh, I bet Klaus can tell you all about defining your own macros (or whatever they are call those things where you define your own special rules to be applied to some small set of special things scope-limited to certain portions of a document) in TeX or LaTeX.

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2. Where "context" can be codified (broadly agreed to and written as rules), it can be incorporated into software. Where it cannot, no one can definitively say which treatment of spacing is right and which is wrong -- software's output, in such cases, would be no more right and no more wrong than a human's.


All kinds of wrong. You assume that all rules of language can be coded, which is incorrect. ...
But that's not what I said at all. I said things that can be codified can be rolled into software. Things that cannot be codified are things that humans cannot agree on to begin with, and in these cases where humans cannot agree with each other, the software's output would not be more right or more wrong than a human's output.

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What's happened with spelling and grammar errors since the invention of spell and grammar check? Have the number of errors in professional publications gone up or down?

Up. By a hell of a lot.
That's the wrong measure to use. It's like saying that the number of people dying is a lot higher today than it was pre-industrial revolution, hence modern medical science does more harm than good. You forget the denominator -- the total number of people in existence today vs. pre-industrial revolution, the total amount of text published today vs. pre-computer revolution.

I bet # of errors per professionally published word (or even better, # of errors per published word per inflation-adjusted dollar spent on professional publishing) would show a different picture.

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3. In general, "habit" is the sort of thing that digital computers are very good at faking (or at least maintain the appearance of doing so). Specific to the habit of inputing one space or two after a period, computer software already renders it irrelevant in most cases. It may not have worked its way to SMF yet, but that's just a matter of time.


Like I said. Write 20 pages of stuff yourself, run your scripts and send it to me. For a fee, I'll be more than happy to supply you with edits and nice big red marks where your software ****ed up. :biggrin:
Did hundred page stuff and hundreds of pages of stuff with LaTeX (many times that in Word) -- text with subject-specific abbreviations and not-in-dictionary jargons mixed with dozens of equations with odd symbols, figures, footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies and sh!t ... everybody wanted stylistic consistency. Sometimes a slightly different style has to be applied to basically the same material for publishing in a different venue. Human "habit" could not have kept everything straight and "consistent." Reliance on "human habit" alone would have required editing dozens of different places (and you'd invariably miss a few if you try) had you decide to change the way certain subject-specific terms or quantities are to be typographically presented rather than, say, just change the definition of a style or macro in one place. (LaTex FTW!)

It's nice to have human spelling cop or grammar cop or style cop or what have you looking over stuff for you ... but beyond certain scale and/or below certain budget, software is often the best (if not the only) way to go. If nothing else, software takes care of most of the mundane stuff so the human can focus on the substantive or out-of-the-ordinary stuff.

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In all seriousness, at my old job we had a woman who got paid a salary to do precisely that. Because editing software is and will always be inferior to a human's language comprehension.
Imagine how many of her you'd need to maintain the same rate of output without editing software taking care of most of the mundane stuff before things get to her. Jobs like hers will continue to disappear as software grows more capable (hopefully she'd have moved on to bigger and better things by then). It's just a matter of time.
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kenny
HOLY CARP!!!
. . . talk about made up and agreed with. :doh:
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KlavierBauer
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Imagine how many of her you'd need to maintain the same rate of output without editing software taking care of most of the mundane stuff before things get to her. Jobs like hers will continue to disappear as software grows more capable (hopefully she'd have moved on to bigger and better things by then). It's just a matter of time.

That is making a (huge) assumption that software will get to the point that it costs less to develop this software, than to pay someone a low wage to do the work.
There are numerous sites where you can pay people in other countries to do repetitive work that still costs too much to do with software.
For example, if I want to count the number of females in a photograph, I can't easily accomplish that programmatically - and I certainly can't do that in video (current live-render human detection in video is hovering around 5 fps). Rather than dumping a million dollars into R&D to develop the software (which I'm 85% sure is possible to accomplish based solely on theory), it's easier to pay someone to simply count the number of people in a photograph (or a thousand photographs), and tell me how many were men, and how many were women.

Current grammar-checks simply aren't efficient, or even accurate, hence their seldom use. For the foreseeable future it will simply be easier to pay someone to check that manually, and continue to train people to know how to write, in an attempt to avoid these mistakes. Software simply can't handle this at 100% (or even close) yet. It's not known if software will be at that point anytime soon, given the number of poor people on the planet I can pay to do these tasks for me, by human-hand.

I just read an article yesterday on Best Practices pertaining to the use of CAPTCHA. RECAPTCHA is the leading product from Google, and is the hardest to crack - however, software can indeed crack it, with about 30% success. Know why it isn't widely used though? Because it's still cheaper for me to pay someone in Bangladesh to setup spam email accounts for me, than it is for me to either develop, or purchase, software that will automatically signup "real" gmail accounts for me, making past their CAPTCHA.
The going rate right now, is about $1.20 USD per *THOUSAND* valid accounts the nice Bangladesh man sets up for me.
"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper
"He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple

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Axtremus
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HOLY CARP!!!
KlavierBauer
Jan 19 2011, 01:07 PM
Quote:
 
Imagine how many of her you'd need to maintain the same rate of output without editing software taking care of most of the mundane stuff before things get to her. Jobs like hers will continue to disappear as software grows more capable (hopefully she'd have moved on to bigger and better things by then). It's just a matter of time.

That is making a (huge) assumption that software will get to the point that it costs less to develop this software, than to pay someone a low wage to do the work.
Like I kept saying, it's just a matter of time for software to get there. Wages creeps up over time, software cost creeps down over time. Intersection is inevitable.
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jon-nyc
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Cheers
kenny
Jan 19 2011, 01:05 PM
. . . talk about made up and agreed with. :doh:
Like your post in English - a language made up and agreed with :doh:

In fact, its a language - also made up and agreed with. :doh:

Sh1t, Kenny, we're on a forum - made up and agreed with. :doh:

Man, I just called you Kenny. THats a name. Names are made up and agreed with. :doh:


By the way, before my forehead gets bruised beyond recognition, could you tell me what's so bad about something being made up and agreed with?
In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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KlavierBauer
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HOLY CARP!!!
software cost creeps down?

Software cost is hourly, and as functionality increases, so do man hours. Sure, dynamic runtimes like CakePHP and Ruby allow developers to "scaffold" in a way they couldn't before, and reduce man hours considerably (no argument there), but there's still a net gain in man hours going into development of large/new projects (like what we're describing).
The intersection is plausible, perhaps even probable, but certainly not inevitable.

"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper
"He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple

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Aqua Letifer
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ZOOOOOM!
Axtremus
Jan 19 2011, 12:33 PM
Oh, I bet Klaus can tell you all about defining your own macros (or whatever they are call those things where you define your own special rules to be applied to some small set of special things scope-limited to certain portions of a document) in TeX or LaTeX.
Prove to me your software will be able to take care of every special case and exception possible. You can't, because that's ridiculous.

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But that's not what I said at all. I said things that can be codified can be rolled into software. Things that cannot be codified are things that humans cannot agree on to begin with, and in these cases where humans cannot agree with each other, the software's output would not be more right or more wrong than a human's output.


Okay, we can go along repeating ourselves if we want. Still doesn't make you any less wrong. There are plenty of instances where 1) humans agree on rules that 2) editing software doesn't get right.

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I bet # of errors per professionally published word


What did I say. "Have the number of errors in professional publications gone up or down?" Read better.

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Imagine how many of her you'd need to maintain the same rate of output without editing software taking care of most of the mundane stuff before things get to her. Jobs like hers will continue to disappear as software grows more capable (hopefully she'd have moved on to bigger and better things by then). It's just a matter of time.


You've never done editing work. If you did, you'd know that a page is a page, and the difference between reading an entire page and finding few vs. many errors is negligible. The point is, you'll always need a human being to do your editing if you want it done right.

I mean, I've done this every day for three years, Ax. I've had to go through this very process, for thousands and thousands of pages of material. What do you have to back up your case, other than abstraction and theories?
I cite irreconcilable differences.
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Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
Looks like lots of other people have already said it, but I'll add in the same. I learned "two spaces after a period" in the days of typewriters. It was very annoying when I started using word processing software back in the '90's, and being told that what I was doing was "wrong." But I eventually got used to it, and always just use a single space now - have for a long, long time.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
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RosemaryTwo
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HOLY CARP!!!
Depends on how expensive the medium is.

AP papers ask for only one space. Most magazines do too. Inches of text must be paid for by inches of ads.

Minus this fiscal concern, two spaces.
"Perhaps the thing to do is just to let stupid run its course." Aqua
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RosemaryTwo
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HOLY CARP!!!
Depends on how expensive the medium is.

AP papers ask for only one space. Most magazines do too. Inches of text must be paid for by inches of ads.

Minus this fiscal concern, two spaces.
"Perhaps the thing to do is just to let stupid run its course." Aqua
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jon-nyc
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Cheers
Apparently TNCR space is pretty cheap, huh Rosemary. :)
In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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brenda
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..............
jon-nyc
Jan 19 2011, 02:46 PM
kenny
Jan 19 2011, 01:05 PM
. . . talk about made up and agreed with. :doh:
Like your post in English - a language made up and agreed with :doh:

In fact, its a language - also made up and agreed with. :doh:

Sh1t, Kenny, we're on a forum - made up and agreed with. :doh:

Man, I just called you Kenny. THats a name. Names are made up and agreed with. :doh:


By the way, before my forehead gets bruised beyond recognition, could you tell me what's so bad about something being made up and agreed with?
:lol2: :lol2: :lol2: :clap: :clap: :clap:

Thanks, Jon, I enjoyed that.

Oh, don't worry, Kenny. :hug:
“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”
~A.A. Milne
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brenda
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..............
Say, is anyone else thinking of chocolate chip scones? How many bags do you want with that?
“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”
~A.A. Milne
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Ballyhoo
Middle Aged Carp
Axtremus
Jan 19 2011, 12:33 PM
LaTex FTW!
:thumb:
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JBryan
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I am the grey one
Seems the discussion magically transformed from "that is easy to do in software" to "someday, software will be sophisticated enough to do that". How could you argue with that?
"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne


There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it".


Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody.

Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore.

From The Lion in Winter.
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KlavierBauer
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HOLY CARP!!!
:D
"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper
"He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple

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Axtremus
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HOLY CARP!!!
JBryan
Jan 20 2011, 04:14 AM
Seems the discussion magically transformed from "that is easy to do in software" ...
Reading comprehension FAIL right there.
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KlavierBauer
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HOLY CARP!!!
??
"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper
"He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple

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JBryan
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I am the grey one
Axtremus
Jan 19 2011, 10:27 AM
Aqua Letifer
Jan 19 2011, 10:23 AM
You write a manuscript more than 20 pages in length and I guaran-damn-tee you'll miss more than a couple. And inconsistency's a graver sin than poor formatting.
That's why you want the computer to apply a set of rules, consistently and completely, across the whole document for you.
Come on, Ax. You started out making it sound pretty darned easy.
"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne


There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it".


Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody.

Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore.

From The Lion in Winter.
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KlavierBauer
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HOLY CARP!!!
You've even maintained up until just a few posts ago, that you can deliver a picture perfect manuscript to AL, created in latex, with all of the proper spacing, which AL has challenged you to do.

Hence my "??" - I'm not seeing the reading comprehension fail.
In fact, JBryan would be pretty low on my list of folks that I'd suspect would suffer from reading comprehension problems on this forum.
"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper
"He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple

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JBryan
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I am the grey one
Huh?
"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne


There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it".


Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody.

Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore.

From The Lion in Winter.
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