[libreoffice-users] Re: spacing after punctuation

On 9/6/13 6:56 PM, Virgil Arrington wrote:
> On 09/06/2013 05:20 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
> > On 9/5/13 9:23 AM, T. R. Valentine wrote:
> > > As a follow-up to our earlier discussion of one versus two spaces
> > > following a full point/full stop/period, I offer the following passage
> > > from /About Face: Reviving the Rules of Typography/ by David Jury
> > > (typos mine):
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > <sigh>  With the different ways people reply to this group, this
> > discussion is all over the place when using gmane and a newsreader.   :-(
> >
> > I think I've got all of these messages read, and it seems to me
> > everyone has overlooked one thing, the font itself.  What did the
> > designer do with the individual characters and punctuation marks and
> > whatever else may be in the font regarding white space in the glyph
> > itself?
> >
> > It seems logical to me that's going to make a difference in whether
> > the spacing after a period, for example, should be 1, 1.5, or 2
> > spaces.  And maybe, you'll just have to do some manual kerning.
> >
> > Or...  Am I missing something?
> Ken,
>
> I don't think you're missing anything, but most of us aren't using LO to
> prepare the *final* version of a document for  professional publication
> (i.e., books, magazines, etc.). I would truly hope that a publishing
> house would do more than just take a word processing document and print
> it out in book format. (In fact, many professional writers use nothing
> more than Notepad, saying their publishers strip all user-inserted
> formatting anyway). So, if there's any manual kerning to be done, I
> would expect that to be done on a level far above LO.
>
> When I argue for one space instead of two, I'm thinking in terms of
> business letters, memos, legal briefs (I'm a lawyer) or scholastic
> papers (I also teach at our local university). These are the types of
> documents I prepare with LO, and when preparing them, I want to follow
> professional typographic standards as much as I can. Ergo, one space.
> But, manual kerning goes beyond what I think should be expected of
> anyone on this level of document preparation.

Virgil,

I understand wanting to follow "best shop practices" for printing. 
Which is why I'm just starting out on giving LyX a run for some things I 
want to write.

But, even being that anal (LOL), it doesn't answer my questions about 
the design of the font itself, and the effect of the design, regardless 
of who does the final setup of the document.

I kinda stayed out of the one space or two discussion, but if you look 
at this post, which has both your style (one space) and mine (two 
spaces), when it's a monospace font as I see this post I find the single 
space more difficult to read.  Not terribly, but harder.   :-)  If if 
the font is proportional, I generally stumble at the beginning when 
reading a document of some kind that has single spaces at the end of the 
sentence until the brain adjusts.  Too often, my brain interprets a 
single spacing at the end of a sentence as just one long, very long, run 
on sentence.  :-)

When I get the time, and have a reason to use LO again, I'm going to go 
into the autocorrect function and see if I can follow my own suggestion 
in another thread about substitution of a different space when the right 
punctuation/space combinations are typed, following my ingrained habits. 
   LOL

Kind of an off topic questions, but don't a lot of legal papers use full 
justification?


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.8.4
Firefox 23.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.04


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