Capitalised words in web design

In the colleges today you are not allowed to disagree that global warming is man made either or you get marked down!

Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, no debate is allowed if you want to pass…


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2009/6/3 Paul Bradforth email@hidden:

But there are some things that can never be trends. Among them is, for
instance, the increasingly prevalent use of apostrophes in plurals.

You’re not alone here on that matter:

http://www.imagic-design.demon.co.uk/apostrophobia

Roger

Roger Houghton
Bath, Somerset
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On 3 Jun 2009, at 10:55, Colin Alcock wrote:

I still get email and printed material from people who put a double
space after a full-stop. This harks back to the time when we all used
typewriters with a monospaced font, and people were taught to do that
to better differentiate the gap between sentences. And it did.

It still does. Anyone with a typesetting background will tell you that a double space after a full stop is correct, as well as being more pleasing to the eye. It allows the reader to quickly find the start of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. In so doing, this technique improves readability. People have been told that this is an anachronism, but that’s not the whole story. Try it on a sample of text and see if you think two spaces really does improve readability. I think you’ll find that it does.


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On 3 Jun 2009, at 14:51, Ashley wrote:

At the college my wife is being told to add a double space after a
full stop, which I always feel is wrong.

it is, totally. For instance, you’ll never see it in a magazine or
newspaper or any printed article of any length; the reason being that
it leads to unsightly ‘rivers’ of white throughout the text down the
page. It never used to be used in these places in the old days either;
newspapers and magazines have never used it. Only business letters.
And of course, there used to be a place for it, as referred to in my
previous post; the use of monospaced fonts lead to confusion about
spacing between sentences, and this double-spacing was brought in to
counteract that. It’s such a meme now though that folks have forgotten
why it was introduced, and that those particular circumstances haven’t
existed for decades.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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On 3 Jun 2009, at 14:56, Paul Hibbert wrote:

It still does. Anyone with a typesetting background will tell you
that a double space after a full stop is correct, as well as being
more pleasing to the eye.

I think if you don’t mind, I’ll wait half an hour before I reply, to
give anyone with a typesetting background time to chime in …

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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2009/6/3 Paul Hibbert email@hidden:

Anyone with a typesetting background will tell you that a double space after a full stop is correct, as well as being more pleasing to the eye.

I don’t agree and I’d be surprised if any decent typesetter would make
such a claim. Double-spacing is from typewriting, not typesetting.
Look at any printed book, both pre- and post digital - there’ll be no
double-spacing between sentences.

Roger

Roger Houghton
Bath, Somerset
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Just don’t try it on the Web. You can put as many spaces in a row as
you like, and they’ll always collapse to one space.

As to two spaces looking better than one, it’s a matter of taste and
probably also the font and layout software in use. Proper typesetting
includes a bit of extra right-bearing on a period (full stop). This is
built into the kerning pairs of professional fonts, and respected by
professional software when laying out a line.

Walter

On Jun 3, 2009, at 9:56 AM, Paul Hibbert wrote:

Try it on a sample of text and see if you think two spaces really
does improve readability. I think you’ll find that it does.


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Please pass the Wite-Out®…

On Jun 3, 2009, at 10:01 AM, Paul Bradforth wrote:

It’s such a meme now though that folks have forgotten why it was
introduced, and that those particular circumstances haven’t existed
for decades.


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On 3 Jun 2009, at 15:04, Roger Houghton wrote:

I don’t agree and I’d be surprised if any decent typesetter would make
such a claim. Double-spacing is from typewriting, not typesetting.
Look at any printed book, both pre- and post digital - there’ll be no
double-spacing between sentences.

And I didn’t even have to wait half an hour :slight_smile:

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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2009/6/3 Paul Bradforth email@hidden:

And I didn’t even have to wait half an hour :slight_smile:

Although I can’t claim to have a typesetting background (but I do have
lots of books).

Roger

Roger Houghton
Bath, Somerset
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On 3 Jun 2009, at 15:44, Roger Houghton wrote:

2009/6/3 Paul Bradforth email@hidden:

And I didn’t even have to wait half an hour :slight_smile:

Although I can’t claim to have a typesetting background (but I do have
lots of books).

Ah, now you’ve gone and spoilt it!

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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Sometime around 3/6/09 (at 06:23 -0400) Ashley said:

My confusion has increased recently, since my wife started working
at a local college, while training to become a teacher.

Ahhh, academic writing style. Or should I say Academic Writing Style…

It sounds like that particular local college (ahem: “Local College”)
has got it bad. Academic writing style can be horrendous; convoluted,
complex, and confounding.

Mind you, course titles are proper nouns, as are job titles and
departments, so that’s perfectly reasonable.

k


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On typewriters caps were the way to emphasise.

That, and back-spacing and adding underscores.

But the typewriter always was a dead-end road as far as typesetting,
typography and correct usage is concerned. That is the tool that led
to millions of people believing that sentences should be
double-spaced apart, but THAT (ouch, shh!) was just to compensate for
the massive restrictions imposed by the monospaced character sets
required by typewriter mechanics.

k


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Anyone with a typesetting background will tell you that a double
space after a full stop is correct

[spits coffee everywhere]

This really isn’t the case, not unless the typesetting background was
based on a Smith-Corona. It was indeed done because of the
difficulties in distinguishing sentence breaks, but only because the
idiosyncracies of monospaced characters made the normal single space
more difficult to spot. And typewriters had to use the same width
character space for each letter because of their fundamentally crude
designs.

k (designer, typographer, publishing senior lecturer)


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