I posted something. Then I noticed that it was formatted wrong! I went back to fix it in edit mode. It seemed fine in edit mode. I saved it again. It was still wrong.
The thing that was wrong: In source / edit, my sentences are separated with the charcters “period space space”. This is a typing standard that improves legibility, which is extra important in effortposts. However, in the displayed mode, one of every double space had been eaten! Every post, every comment, mangled! Sentences are separated with “period space” instead of “period space space” and the text is slightly less legible for it. I noticed it for questionmark space space and exclamationmark space space as well. There’s some secret life form eating spaces.
Testing behavior: Period Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Period Space Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Period Space Space Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Yep, saw it in preview, all the spaces are getting eaten. This is a crime against good style. I won’t go so far as to say this is a hate crime against anyone who struggles with reading and visual processing… yet. But the site is editing my comment in order to enforce an objectively worse typographical standard (period singlespace). Literally 
. 
on Communist Bear Site they automatically censor out your punctuation marks in order to make your writing conform to a worse standard, calling double spaces a bourgeois decadent waste of space.
Please help
(Also, should this go in /c/technology or in /c/hexbear? It’s about both)
(Should I be submitting this as a bug report on github instead?)
I’m a graphic designer, and the first thing I do when I flow copy is find and replace double spaces with single spaces. Other people have already posted why (automatic kerning, monospaced fonts), but it’s a vestige of the typewriter era, not best practices for the internet.
There are a lot of horrible type standards on the internet, like not auto-ragging, QWERTY vs. DVORAK keyboards, and horribly inconsistent treatment of ligatures, but relics of the typewriter days are not one of them.
I really don’t like bad keming.
Do not kem
bad keming is just the vvorst
Double spacing is the worst, sorry OP
I am apparently severely in the minority on this one. It’s interesting how apparently subjective and varied omething I assumed was a common fact of visual processing and text reading turns out to be.
This is how I learned to type also, and a person that I worked with on an accessibility documentation project last year finally convinced me to break the habit. As others have said, this convention emerged when all fonts were monospace, and it did indeed improve clarity there. It no longer does on modern systems, and in fact makes it harder for some people to read. It is no longer the standard and is actually actively discouraged for accessibility reasons. It took me about a week to actually break the habit, but it wasn’t too bad. I’d advise you to do the same.
Was there an accessibility angle to their argument beyond “makes it harder for some users to read”? (not that that’s an invalid argument but I don’t think it’s self evident)
I’m not a double space user and don’t necessarily think this behavior needs to change, but if you, like OP, subjectively find something easier to read and are accustomed to it, I don’t think “no, its a historical relic and doesn’t make a difference in readability” will be very convincing in that situation…
Ultimately, hexbear is not using a wysiwyg editor, but it is frustrating when there’s no good way to make your post look how you want it to, whether that’s for an effort post, a dumb meme with emotes or ascii art type drawings or whatever, and space collapsing is much more disruptive than newline collapsing in that way
The person I was working with was an accessibility librarian in her regular job (this project was for an org) and I mostly just took her word for it since I didn’t care too much one way or another; it was just a habit I’d had from learning to type in the early 1990s. She did mention that it can confuse some screen reading software, which is wild but again I believe she probably knows what she’s talking about–she is a pretty well known advocate in that space, and was up on all the best practices research.
fair enough. I wonder if/how modern screen readers still have such problems
I’m an educator with primarily adult learners who have learning disabilities. So I can share a few insights into ways that digital fonts are handled for accessibility. These are guidelines, though, and often the best solution is to create text that can be tailored by the end-user for whatever best suits them using their individual accessibility software.
Screen readers (as far as the ones I’ve seen in action) aren’t the reason behind dropping the extra space. They work just fine, they ignore the extra space and read the sentences out no problem. It’s actually because of space rivers. Space rivers are an optical phenomenon in which space between words is seen as a river wending through text: in other words, the spaces can create a seeming pattern that are distracting for readers (especially those with dyslexia). That extra space makes spacing inconsistent, which draws the eye to trace the rivers (though dark mode has some success in cutting down on perceived rivers).
More important is consistency. Consistent spacing. Consistent kerning. Legible fonts. Extra space between lines is a huge help as well, All bold text can also be a big help for dyslexic readers, though less helpful in dark mode.
Space rivers… I finally have a way to call it. And it’s not for everyone? Huh, I somehow thought it was a common thing.
Thanks for explaining about the space rivers! Since html controls it all I guess it’s moot anyway; I can write it how I want to and then html will alter it.
I’m not kidding when I say that the extra space seems helpful to me. I read the arguments about “modern kerning” but if I open a text editor on my computer, using Helvetica font, and type up a couple paragraphs, the double spaced version is easier on my brain. Less fatigue. If I replace all the double spaces with single spaces it becomes harder to read.
This is an interesting thread and I wonder if part of why I struggle with reading very long comments is because of the spacing. A browser extension that detects when there’s only one space after a period and changes it to 2 might be the best solution for me.
This is exactly why text being controllable by the end user is always the best accessibility choice–not everyone’s accessibility needs are the same! You’re definitely not alone in preferring that extra space. I have had learners that have a much easier time with two or three spaces between sentences, and even a couple that preferred extra space between words.
Usually as long as the spacing was consistent the river problem was avoided. Though of course, many people never see or notice rivers, and that particular accessibility issue isn’t one that touches their experience.
I hope you find an extension that works for you. I don’t know any that add that extra space (though there are options in word processors to add that). Sentence Segmenter breaks lines after periods, so it’s certainly possible for one to add space after periods I would have to assume.
My total shot in the dark guess would be that it messes up the rhythm of reading on some implementations, with extra long pauses between sentences. Software can be very weird though so who knows.
I’m sorry, friend, but this isn’t a bug. This is a deliberate feature, common across the web, and it’s to improve readability for most people.
Everyone in this thread is wrong. Double space is good practice. Modern typesetting makes it unnecessary? Who cares? The layout engine can just ignore the space and function semantically. If it doesn’t, its broken and should be fixed. On the other hand, text editors designed for adults with functions that operate on sentences as a unit use the double space to distinguish between an abbreviation and the end of a sentence. Emacs users are a powerful enemy.
Team double space represent!
I acknowledge people’s objections but especially since html makes it entirely moot, they can pry my double spaces from my cold dead tentacles. If I’m writing something I truly do find it easier to scan, return to where I left off if/when I get distracted as I invariably do, read, and review with double spaces. It looks wrong when it’s all single spaced. It’s also muscle memory at this point to double space and doesn’t seem worth training myself out of if the browser is just going to rewrite it anyway.
Here, I’ll try to rewrite that with single spaces.
Yeah that sucked in a bad way.
This is built into html itself.
The head of legal at my last job used double space after fullstop, which she said was for legibility. I don’t think it really improved legibility. Rather, it made me mentally pause longer and uncomfortably between sentences, and it looked noticeably unnatural.
you’re not typing on a typewriter, the double space after a period is purely unnecessary and distracting for the reader
Femboy Stalin, have you considered that I might actually be typing on a typewriter and then using OCR to copy the text from the paper into a text document which I then copy/paste into the comment field of Hexbear dot net?
Apparently it’s either an html standard or a browser setting; either way I can type my way and the browser will display it the standard way for others so I guess it works out. When I’m reading my own writing I find the double space helpful, not distracting or unnecessary, while the single space makes it harder to parse.
17·5 days agoThis is a feature of web browsers, they will “collapse whitespace”
I think this is the technically correct answer and the reason you can use a Non Line Breaking Space code
to add spaces to HTML documents.It is, cuz if I go into developer tools and check the paragraphs the two spaces are still there.
Interesting. Looks like there’s no way for me to adjust it then?
Not really.
You could however maybe get something that turns
.into. Edit: If I made an addon for hexbear I would include it in it.
If this is a bit; hilarious. If its a sincere post, then I’m sorry OP you’re a relic of a time that no longer exists. Double spacing is excellent for improving readability on monospaced fonts e.g. from typewriters or in terminal windows.
This is a sentence separated by 2 spaces.As can be seen it clearly de-marks the gap much wider than the gap between characters that occurs in monospace fonts. This helps readability.This is a sentence separated by 1 space. It is a little harder to see the period space in a monospace due to many characters having a gap between them.But this isn’t a relevant property in modern fonts that have different layout dependent not just on the character width (5 l’s take less space than 5 m’s; lllll mmmmm) but also the gaps are consistent between characters depending on the preceding and following characters, by allowing overlap in spaces by clever kerning e.g. between the Y and the o of You, note how the o sits under the arms of the Y. This means the gaps between characters on modern fonts are consistent, and the single space is clear to see for legibility. Trying to force widen the gap on a period using double spaces with modern kerning is not better for legibility and can in some instances make it worse for readability and cause other technical issues.
I’m genuinely glad you find some hilarity in my mostly serious post :) .
Thanks for the technical explanation and example about monospacing and kerning. It’s interesting and doesn’t change how I feel about the spaces, but this discussion is helping me notice some things.
Maybe it’s not “legibility” that the double space improves, but speed of recovering my place when I lose it. Or pacing. Or both. Because I definitely get lost in the text easier when there’s just the single space. I don’t know how many times a minute my eyes dart away from the text for a fraction of a second, but the number is greater than zero, and that big recognizable gap between sentences makes it easier to recover my place
This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of the way browsers render HTML (and possibly whatever Lemmy is using to render Markdown is automatically stripping extra spaces anyway). It means that you can format Markdown/HTML however you like (e.g. inserting line breaks in the middle of paragraphs that will be rendered as spaces, or indenting HTML to be more readable to you) whilst it’s still user-friendly when rendered.
You could use
if you want things to appear double-spaced.Thanks! I’ll probably just let it censor me, because typing   after every sentence would mess up my muscle memory, and it seems many people hate it for the way they process text. Well, maybe I’ll try just this one time. I see there’s quite the tradeoff; it looks better in preview mode but so much worse in composition mode. This is perhaps the worst of both worlds! Ah, the true nature of compromise, that everyone should lose.
You could use some kind of keyboard macro to replace
<space><space>with if it’s important to you.Imo someone who wants to see two spaces after each sentence can easily make a userscript or browser add-on that does that. People will be fine reading your posts as-is.
By allah you people are dogs!
Double spacing after the period improves readability on all fonts not just monospaced ones! When reading a paragraph of sentences it’s much easier to pick out the markers between them as you scan ahead when those have both the punctuation mark and a different spacing!
There could be some argument made for spacing after sentences the same as between words if our forum were using accursed full justification but we’re left justified.
A full stop and a space is perfectly legible and is used most places. I think double spacing like that is for typewriters
ok grandma let’s get you back to the homethere’s probably a browser extension you can use that replaces ". " with ". " + " "
I found one that replaces dotspacespace with dotspace, but not one for the other way around
at the risk of enabling you there is probably a somewhat reasonable way to set up a macro to automatically do the forced whitespace character when you double on the spacebar.
I might try to set one up. For now I’m manually adding
when I want it because I think if I want to be extra like and write in a way that annoys others, I should have to put in some effort to do so. What is victory without struggle? What is performance art without effort?I’m trying to figure out ways to do it on the client side so I can just read it my way, but it’s proving harder than I expected to get something running that is thorough, covers all edge cases, and isn’t abysmally slow :(
This is a feature of Markdown, which is what Hexbear uſes to format poſts. What Operating Syſtem are you uſing ? I uſe em quads between ſentences, as is the common practice in older printing, but an en quad and a ſpace alſo works (ſometimes even better than an em quad due to allowing for more expanſion in juſtified lines), as was done on the Linotype machines. For Windows, it’s eaſy to make an AutoHotKey ſcript to replace the double ſpace with ſomething more workable, and on Linux, there are various options available.
While talking about readability, what’s with the ſ character use?
It’s the long s, a variant of the letter s, which has been uſed in Engliſh (and moſt other languages that uſe the Latin alphabet) for moſt of its written hiſtory. It ſtarted to fall out of faſhion in the 19th century, but I ſtill uſe it in accordance with the typeſetting rules followed in high-quality printing of the late 18th century. Regarding readability, that’s one reaſon I uſe it, other than finding hiſtorical printing beautiful and intereſting, as well as other reaſons : The more varied ſhape the long s adds to words and lines of text can aid reading. I’ve had people ſay it helps with dyſlexia too, but alſo have had people ſay it’s not helpful and confuſing. I’ve been conſidering making a poſt here to get the opinions of people here from a materialiſt perſpective, as the dialecticks involved are curious to think about, and I’ve been internally debating whether it actually does what I believe and intend with its uſe.
how do you feel about the þ? i have seen a few people on lemmy bringing þat one back
Þ is a neat letter, and I think it’s actually quite uſeful. I perſonally don’t uſe it in my orthography, but I’d ſupport its general uſe. It would, in my opinion, be an improvement, and ſave on ſome typing, as th is the moſt common digraph in Engliſh, and would give the language a nice flow in reading.
Maybe if someone gets used to that character it can be more readible, but it makes it much less smooth to read for me now. I would guess it fell out of usage because to me it seems unnecessary. I don’t mind the triple spaces really though. But I think being further away from the general standard can make the format distract from the content of the text because it’s not as typical and makes it take more time to comprehend, for me at least.
That’s a good point : it can be more difficult to read if not acclimated to it, which ſomewhat negates the potential benefit. Seeming unneceſſary or being more complex is one reaſon it fell out of faſhion, but the primary driver, at leaſt in Engliſh, was ſocio-political. People at the time wanted to draw a diſtinction between the old way and new way as things were being more and more induſtrialized and ſtandardized—new typefaces alſo were being developed and adopted at the time, further reflecting theſe feelings and deſire for change. The arguments in favour of the long s and its potential benefits are far leſs objectively diſcernable than thoſe for wider ſpacing. It’s alſo true that being farther from what is familiar can take longer to comprehend or read, which could be poſitive if ſomeone takes more time to think about what they’re doing or what one is trying to convey, but negative if it detracts and diſtracts from the content, as you pointed out.
I do appreciate your effort though, language is always evolving, things go out of favor and come back so it’s cool to try different styles to see if they can catch on or can be useful. A lot of things that were modernized from the classical era to the industrial/post industrial era might not actually be ideal for things like accessibility or freedom of expression etc, compared to things that were developed over centuries. I find the style a bit odd because I don’t see it much, but having more characters in English writing could definitely be useful and helpful for learning pronunciation possibly.
Language is always evolving, and that’s great. It’s intereſting when things go in and out of favour, much like faſhion. the really great thing is where it can help with acceſſibility and freedom of expreſſion or other elements, where modern tools and methods can really help it ſhine and be eaſier to write how one wants, or diſplay text how one wants or needs, than it ever was hiſtorically.
Wider ſpacing is ſomething that is truly uſeful and of great benefit to both humans and machines ; the long s, I’d ſay that the main benefit is one of expreſſion and æſthetick overall, and juſt an orthographical convention and viſually different way of doing things. It can be beneficial, but I worry it can alſo be harmful, and looking at ſome of the language reforms in places like the USSR and China, or the Literacy Campaign in Cuba, we can ſee that having ſomething more ſimple might be more beneficial to literacy, but there is ſtill room for different preſentation or ways of writing, eſpecially when people can eaſily cuſtomize their viewing experience. The main iſſue with that, however, is the general technological barrier and fact that there’s no default way to do that without going out of one’s way to get the right addons or typefaces, which ought to be available by default. That would be a great acceſſibility feature.
I would read that
Ah shit the long s is growing on me. My biggest complaint is that I don’t like how the little read-aloud voice in my head pronounces “started” as “ftarted”.
I also don’t know why it exists. Was it because of handwriting conventions?
farted to fall out
It can take time to learn to read with it, as it can be ſimilar to other letters. Moſt people ſee it being ſimilar to an f, to which it is moſt ſimilar, but I’ve alſo had people ſay it looks like an l or even t to them, which is intereſting.
It originates in Old Roman Curſive, where it was an elongated form of s, where it was juſt part of the convention. After that, it was uſed in all forms of the alphabet, and has thus been uſed in moſt languages that alſo uſe the Latin alphabet. Newer languages don’t have it hiſtorically, but even Vietnameſe did uſe it at one time. It later was uſed in printing. Here’s an article that talks a bit about its hiſtory and uſe, and here’s another that talks about the rules for its uſe in different languages and time periods ; although, it doeſn’t liſt all languages or rules, as it doeſn’t cover caſes like “ misſtate ” verſus “ croſstie.” It is one of the moſt comprehenſive articles I’ve ſeen, though, and is overall very good. Hiſtorical people never wrote down much about its uſe, which is intereſting, as everyone was uſing it for about a thouſand years.
I’m ſure it’ſ meant to emphaſize the point, and it’ſ very eaſy to read through, but it doeſ look very ſilly.
Good bit, point noted, and I like the spacing in your comment more than the spacing I see in standardly formatted comments!
It took me til your 3rd sentence to notice you were uſing the long s. I confeſs to finding the long ſ superfluous and distracting.
I’m using MacOS and I’ve got software to customize my keyboard so I have a custom layout because couple years ago I had a legitimate need to be able to type “hæmoglobin”, and then I never switched back. I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but the bigger question is ¿should I? when many people apparently struggle with the presence of that double space.
I’ve never had anyone have a ſtruggle with wider ſpacing, but ſome people do find it ſtyliſtically unhappy or were taught ſomething wrong about it. There’s actually a lot of miſinformation ſurrounding the hiſtory of ſpacing and why it changed, ſuch as ſaying it’s a “ a veſtige of the typewriter era.” It’s not—we’ve done ſpacing like that for the entirety of printing hiſtory : ſetting two ſpaces on typewriters was in emulation of the ſtandard printing practice. There’s actually a really neat blog that diſcuſſes this and other bits of hiſtory about it, which you and others might enjoy.
I don’t perſonally know enough about MacOS tools to ſuggeſt ſomething that could enable mode ſuitable ſpacing characters automatically, but I can look into it it it would be helpful ! That ſoftware, depending on how it works, might be able to do it, though. Traditionally, we’d have the wideſt ſpace after terminal punctuation (between ſentences), ſlightly wider after colons and ſemi-colons, and very ſmall ſpaces between moſt punctuation and the words. The main point is to give the reader time to reſt and abſorb what they’ve juſt read, as well as to clearly deſignate and give importance to the punctuation and various parts of ſentences, but the wider ſpacing does ſerve other purpoſes as well.
If you’re in a browſer and like reading with it, one thing I could recommend is a typeface that automatically ſpaces around punctuation and an addon like Stylus to apply it. Elſtob is one ſuch typeface. Here’s an example of what your comment looks like to me :
I’m convinced you’re not doing a bit at this point, and I love that even more. This Is very cool, thank you. I’ll check this blog out tomorrow
It’s not a bit. It’s how I’ve been writing for moſt of my life. I’m glad you like it, and I hope you like the blog !
Triple spaces and dumb characters? That’s an easy block.
I love how you missed the joke here.
Uhm, actually. It’s not triple spaces, it’s an em space/quad
