Re: [libreoffice-users] Can't find setting

I have been to college 6 times.  Three for degrees and twice to pick up 
courses I wanted, one dropped out due to money issues and decided to not 
go after that degree/major.  I had to take several English 
writing-related classes.  The first degree required a typing course.  
Ever since then, on mainframes and the PCs, I was told to always use 
double-spacing after sentences.  If I handed in a typed or 
word-processed document and did not double space it, I was marked off 
for not using the standard "format".  Also some required double-spacing 
for the lines of text as well.

Yes, there are those people who do not like a double space after 
sentences, due to the justifying of the text for a book or similar 
printed "document".  Personally, I have a friend in the book editing 
field and if the publisher wanted a single spaced manuscript, then all 
you need to do is change a double space to a single one in you text 
editor, like LO.  I have done that before. I tend to automatically add 
the double space at the end of my sentences by 40+ years of typing on a 
computer keyboard, dumb terminal or PC based.

Now as for changes in what it "proper" formatting styles, I noticed that 
over the years, the "proper" ways of doing things, like footnotes and 
the other non-paragraph items, seem to change over the years.  What was 
done in the 70's and 80's was not "proper" in the 90's and '00's.

To be honest, you need people, like our documentation writers, to tell 
us what is acceptable now.  They should be "up" on the current document 
formating ideas.  But, if you were to talk to a newspaper writer, you 
will find that they would be told that double spacing would waste 
"column space".  For a book writer, writing 200+ page books, all of 
those double spaces can add up several [or many] more pages to be 
printed than the single spacing style.  For people who charge by the 
page, then it could add up over a large number of copies.

So, personally I use double spacing.  THEN, if I was to have it 
published, and needed to use single spacing, I would remove those extra 
spaces from the manuscript.  That is simple enough today.

On 08/16/2013 03:06 AM, Brian Barker wrote:
> At 08:23 15/08/2013 -0400, James Knott wrote:
> > I have long been in the habit of putting a double space between 
> > sentences.
>
> Indeed - and so have I.
>
> > I learned that in a typing class, IIRC.
>
> Yes, but was that on a typewriter, where double spaces make sense?
>
> > What's the proper procedure in LO?
>
> It's entirely up to every user what s/he does, of course.  There are 
> two main points, I think.
>
> o I would suggest that two spaces are probably useful with fixed-pitch 
> text as on a typewriter, especially when the sentence-ending full stop 
> will be spaced so far from the last character of the sentence.  So 
> that's why we all learned that way.  But that no longer applies with 
> proportional fonts.  (I still use double spaces in e-mail messages, 
> since I send them as plain text and have no control how they are 
> displayed by recipients.)
>
> o In justified text, there is no such thing as a "single space" 
> anyway: the size of the space between words depends on what happens to 
> occur in the line.  So there is no meaning to "two spaces" either: 
> your word processor may permit you to include two consecutive space 
> characters, but two spaces on one line could end up narrower than a 
> single space on the next.
>
> I'm really only throwing out the ideas, of course: it's up to 
> individuals what they choose to do.  (You'll have noticed my 
> emoticon.)  But it is worth dissuading novice word processor users not 
> to attempt to use multiple spaces to indent text, for example: apart 
> from being messy, this again will simply not work effectively in 
> justified text or when rendered on another system..  The original 
> questioner asked about "a series of spaces" (not necessarily double); 
> he could have been attempting to line up text in columns, where he 
> should (and could easily) have been using tabs or tables instead.
>
> Brian Barker


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