&ensp in a monospaced font

Ed Mullen wrote:

Harlan Messinger wrote:
mrcakey wrote:
Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in
text? I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the
conventional 2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a
full stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters.
Since you aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense of
nostalgia isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace font
to display your pages), there isn't any reason to have two full-width
spaces after a full stop.

I understand all of that. But, for those of us who learned to touch
type in 1963 it's nearly impossible to break the habit of hitting the
space bar twice after a period.

It also scans better, in my opinion. I think that's important; I can
single space regardless of my training, and I would if it worked better.


--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
Blinky: http://blinkynet.net

In article <YJUyj.305626$jx4.122795 (AT) reader1 (DOT) news.saunalahti.fi>,
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

Except for the few white space characters for which collapsing is
specifically required, whether *any* character collapses is
unspecified.

That's nonsense and you know that.

Which is the likelier theory:

1. Harlan Messinger looks about to see what nonsense he can talk,
and cannot resist going for it.

or

2. Jukka K.Korpela looks to see what he can say to cause pain and
offence to someone while he typing just for the sake of it, there
not being an actual need.

--
dorayme

On 2008-03-03, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

Scripsit Ben C:

On 2008-03-03, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:
[...]
3) Whether em spaces, en spaces, or no-break spaces collapse is
explicitly declared unspecified in HTML specifications. In practice
they don't, but if IE 8 or Firefox 4 starts collapsing them, you can
only blame yourself if you relied on their not being collapsed.

CSS specifications (CSS 2.1, 16.6.1) do say that the only things that
get collapsed are U+0009, U+000D, U+000A and U+0020.

CSS specifications (or drafts - note that the document you cite says "It
is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress")

Did I cite it as other than work in progress?

cannot trump HTML specifications. HTML does not "need" CSS, still less a
particular version of CSS.

Fair enough but the majority of people writing HTML these days are doing
so because they expect most people to look at it in CSS-equipped
browsers.

What you cite applies to the white-space property, and it specifies
certain processing of the characters you mention. I don't think the text
describes what may or may not happen to other space characters.

Well it says in 16.6.3 that "Control characters other than tab,
line-feed, space and bidi formatting characters are treated as
characters to render in the same way as any normal character".

You can probably explain better what that means, but as far as I can
tell, implementors are meant to leave the non-breaking spaces in.

On 2008-03-03, Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote:

mrcakey wrote:
"Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote in message
news:632fhrF25fi31U2 (AT) mid (DOT) individual.net...
mrcakey wrote:
Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in text?
I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the
conventional 2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a full
stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters. Since you
aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense of nostalgia
isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace font to display
your pages), there isn't any reason to have two full-width spaces after a
full stop.

Both my alma mater and my erstwhile employer mandated the use of two spaces
after a full stop.

In what context? Typewritten material? If not, why couldn't they have
been operating under the same misconception as many other people if they
insisted on perpetuating the convention after students and employees
started producing word-processed material in proportional typefaces?

Vim does it.
If I start a new sentence here, and then gq the two lines, I get this:

"Vim does it. If I start a new sentence here, and then gq the two lines,
I get this:"

Two spaces after the '.' There's no doubt an option somewhere to change
it to 1 or 3 spaces or any arbitary string but I just live with it as it
is.

Also, from the fmt manpage:

-u, --uniform-spacing
one space between words, two after sentences

So mrcakey, his alma mater, and erstwhile employer are not alone.

On 2008-03-03, Blinky the Shark <no.spam (AT) box (DOT) invalid> wrote:

Harlan Messinger wrote:

Yet I'm not going to worry that some day a new browser version will
display "bookkeeper" as "bokeper". I think it's taken for granted that
characters not arbitrarily collapsing with each other is the norm, and
only situations where they do collapse need to be articulated explicitly.

ot> Are there other English words that contain a consecutive triplet of
doubled letters?

Good question, the answer is no!

These are all the ones I could find in the Scrabble dictionary of
pointless but high-scoring words and various other word lists I have on
my computer:

bookkeeper
bookkeepers
bookkeeping
bookkeeping

I will leave the regular expression to find them as an exercise to the
reader.

If you count things like "aarrgghh" as words then there are few more.

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

Exactly. Unless special treatment is specified, I assume unremarkable
treatment: each character is displayed

A statement about undefined behavior for space characters _does_ specify
special treatment.

- - character sets, fonts, and Unicode exist without regard to HTML,
and
I would expect that whenever HTML doesn't specify otherwise, text
will be displayed in the prevailing manner, which, as I observed
above, at least IMO, means that each character is displayed, and they
aren't arbitrarily collapsed.

No, conforming implementations are not required to display all
characters. Even if Unicode conformance were required, and it isn't,
implementations would not need to support all characters. They won't be
_arbitrarily_ collapsed, but collapsing spaces aren't really "character
collapse" but a matter of spacing.

It seems to me
that with a monospace font, it is a reasonable expectation that each
character, space or otherwise, take up the same space,

It is not reasonable for characters with specific width as part of their
character definition. Specific-width space characters with different
widths in a fixed-width font are a contradictory concept. I would not be
anything on any particular processing of this contradiction, especially
in the HTML context, where we have been warned about undefined
processing.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Scripsit Ben C:

Well it says in 16.6.3 that "Control characters other than tab,
line-feed, space and bidi formatting characters are treated as
characters to render in the same way as any normal character".

You can probably explain better what that means, but as far as I can
tell, implementors are meant to leave the non-breaking spaces in.

It's an absurdity, since control characters proper cannot be rendered as
normal characters. By definition, they have control functions, not
visible rendering. Whether spaces are control characters is a matter of
definition.

This isn't the only part in the CSS 2.1 draft that is hopelessly messy
and obscure, especially if taken as an attempt to dictate what happens
in processing HTML documents in general, rather than as relating
(somehow) to the CSS property being discussed there.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Ben C wrote:

On 2008-03-03, Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote:
mrcakey wrote:
"Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote in message
news:632fhrF25fi31U2 (AT) mid (DOT) individual.net...
mrcakey wrote:
Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in text?
I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the
conventional 2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a full
stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters. Since you
aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense of nostalgia
isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace font to display
your pages), there isn't any reason to have two full-width spaces after a
full stop.
Both my alma mater and my erstwhile employer mandated the use of two spaces
after a full stop.
In what context? Typewritten material? If not, why couldn't they have
been operating under the same misconception as many other people if they
insisted on perpetuating the convention after students and employees
started producing word-processed material in proportional typefaces?

Vim does it.
If I start a new sentence here, and then gq the two lines, I get this:

"Vim does it. If I start a new sentence here, and then gq the two lines,
I get this:"

Vim is a text editor designed for use with a monospace font.

On 2008-03-03, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

Scripsit Ben C:

Well it says in 16.6.3 that "Control characters other than tab,
line-feed, space and bidi formatting characters are treated as
characters to render in the same way as any normal character".

You can probably explain better what that means, but as far as I can
tell, implementors are meant to leave the non-breaking spaces in.

It's an absurdity, since control characters proper cannot be rendered as
normal characters. By definition, they have control functions, not
visible rendering.

That was exactly the problem I was having making sense of it.

Whether spaces are control characters is a matter of definition.

I tend to think of a space not as something you render with a (blank)
glyph but as an instruction to put a gap between glyphs. This makes it
easier to deal with line-breaking because you have the same number of
glyphs regardless of where the lines break.

This isn't the only part in the CSS 2.1 draft that is hopelessly messy
and obscure, especially if taken as an attempt to dictate what happens
in processing HTML documents in general, rather than as relating
(somehow) to the CSS property being discussed there.

If it means anything I think it does basically mean don't collapse
non-breaking spaces given that it's in the section on white-space
collapsing. But I agree it is rather obscure.

Ed Mullen wrote:

Harlan Messinger wrote:
mrcakey wrote:
Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in
text? I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the
conventional 2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a
full stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters.
Since you aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense
of nostalgia isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace
font to display your pages), there isn't any reason to have two
full-width spaces after a full stop.

I understand all of that. But, for those of us who learned to touch
type in 1963 it's nearly impossible to break the habit of hitting the
space bar twice after a period.

Really? I managed it over 15 years ago, as soon as proportional fonts
became available to me (after having been touch-typing since 1974).

In any event, the OP wrote that he'd love to see the spacing *displayed*
as two spaces. If he were coming from where you are, I'd expect the
question to be, "Help, I can't stop putting two spaces after a period.
How can I get them to display as a single space?" followed by, "Oh,
wonderful, HTML does that automatically!"