23 January 2022

ONE SPACE OR TWO?


Just a catch-up.

We have completed our online visa application and have an interview in Manchester on 14th February.  We have asked for a start date of 7th March but have no real idea of when we will actually be going to France.

One of the reasons for not going sooner is a forthcoming wedding for which I have been asked to do some baking and to make the bride’s necklace.  Both a total joy to do.  The dining room has turned into a jewellery factory and the living room is disappearing under mountains of recipe books.


I’ve done a dozen necklace designs for the bride to choose from and Daisy has taken a keen interest in the beading!  I have discovered that those lacey food covers are excellent for keeping her from gently pushing the whole lot off the table!  

My brother has offered to come and stay at our house for five days of the week every time we're away in France.  He's been working from home for nearly two years, just having to do occasional site visits, so "home" can be anywhere he has access to the internet.  Knowing that he will be only five minutes from Dad's flat especially over the weekend, and more especially on Saturdays when the restaurant is closed, is a huge relief.  

Dad now has carers to help him with showering and from this coming week others will be going to give him his tea three times a week.  He gets lunch in the restaurant but had stopped eating anything in the evenings and was losing weight.  Fresh sandwiches were always there in his fridge but he simply didn’t eat them, saying he wasn’t hungry.  We decided to take it in turns to go at teatime every day and found that if we put them on a plate in his hand he would wolf them down.  Having carers to do this for three days will free us from having to plan our whole life around being home every day at 5pm or thereabouts.

This post has been written on my iPad, a first for me I think, the laptop being currently hidden under piles of beading and recipe books.  The annoying thing is that although I can read other blogs using the iPad, my comments don’t appear.  They just get lost.  This happened once before and I thought I’d fixed it but can’t remember how!  I can’t work out how to resize the photos either!

Normal service will be resumed post nuptially!

Just out of interest, do you go for one space or two?  I was amused by something posted on Facebook recently saying that nobody needs to put a double space between sentences nowadays, that it’s an unnecessary and outdated practice.  Decades of typing has hardwired the double space into my writing so I would have to think hard to stop!

Mind you, I’m also a bit picky about spelling and the erroneous use of the apostrophe.  Which probably makes me a dinosaur but I don’t care!  Now I’m officially in the dinosaur age group I'm luxuriating in not having to care about a lot of extra things!  (Double space there.)  How about you?

18 comments:

  1. The idea is that word processed text is easier to read than typed text so double spacing after a full stop or colon is now unnecessary. I was a double spacer, but some harrassment by Simon has led me to retrain as a single spacer. I'm glad to hear you are slowly sorting out the issues with your father, and that your brother will help like that.

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  2. Double spacing and full punctuation in text messages. It may lead to misunderstandings with the youth, but who cares?

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  3. We're both quite pedantic about punctuation and grammar. In the supermarket, the girl said "10 items or less" as Bob approached with his basket "fewer!" he retorted. She accused him of being a geranium. Only later did we work out that she meant a grammarian. GERANIUMS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

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    1. Angela, I love the idea of being a geranium!
      Along with your "futility room"* I shall use the term mercilessly whenever the occasion arises!
      *your term for the utility room from some years ago. It made me chuckle then and still does!

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  4. Good luck with your visit to TLS (Manchester), we were there last Friday!

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  5. Sometimes your commenters are just super folks!! I think I would rather be a geranium than a dinosaur!
    All this just to say that, in my opinion, a written piece of text doesn't look so neat without the double spaces.
    I also have thoughts about the amount of American English creeping into our language but that's another topic!!
    So pleased that you are having help with your Dad.
    X

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  6. Being an English graduate Elizabeth is spot on. "We was here" gets her going every time... Being an Engineer English was my poor subject and spelling definitely not my strong point... It has improved over the years of report writing though... I am a double spacer... but who the hell cares I don't...

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  7. As far as I can tell, no matter whether you put one space or two spaces between words or characters in you blog post, HTML reduces the two spaces to one. Automatically. Let's see how this works. In the first sentence below I put one space between the words. In the second I put two spaces between words.

    The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.
    The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.


    Can you see the difference?

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    1. Sorry for my typo(s) above. There is doubt in my mind now. When I copy a paragraph of text from your blog and paste it into a Windows Notepad file, I see very clearly that you put two spaces after a period. Is that some kind of setting in your Blogger installation? If I paste the same text into a comment on your blog and preview it, the two spaces after the periods become one. Very mysterious. And as Colin says, who really cares?

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    2. Ken, I put two spaces at the end of each sentence because that's what I have always done. My fingers do it automatically. I don't use the HTML setting to compose blog posts so that's how it stays I think.

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    3. I just wonder what "authoring" software you use. Blogger compose mode? When I put two spaces after a period, or between two words, Blogger automatically reduces those spaces to a single space. It doesn't matter whether I'm using HTML mode or Compose mode. Are you composing text in some other software?

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    4. I'm doing it in Blogger, in compose mode. There are definitely two spaces in the text, maybe only one in the published blog. It's hard to tell!

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    5. Looking at it closely maybe only one space when published. Here's my own little test:
      Two spaces. Between these two sentences.
      One spaces. Between these.

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    6. Well there you go, who knew?! Here I am merrily typing two spaces and they end up as one after all!! Hey ho!

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    7. HTML mode is not optional. The Blogger text is in HTML code. Still, when I copy text out of your published blog posts, I see two spaces after periods. I don't know how to get that effect on my blog.

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    8. Jean, I've figured something out on the sentence spacing issue (one space or two?). When you write your post in Compose Mode, Blogger's software automatically inserts a non-breaking ("hard") space right after the period. When you press the space bar on your keyboard, it inserts a "soft" space after the hard space. If you hit the space bar twice, you think the two soft spaces are appearing after periods in your text. But no. What you are seeing is the hard space plus just one soft space, because HTML automatically turns a series of soft spaces (be there two, five, ten or an infinite number of them) as a single space.

      There is no such feature for automatically inserting a hard space in the comment field, so you can only get one space after a period unless you manually insert the HTML non-breaking space code (which is the string &-n-b-s-p-;) without the hyphens. I can't type it here without the putting spaces in it because the comment field just displays a hard space if I do. The same is true of the title field.

      I doubt that all this is very clear.

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  8. I am all for proper grammar and punctuation.
    What a joy about the bride work. I think this sounds a marvelous honor.

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  9. On Google Docs, changing the line spacing options is a simple and quick process that only requires a few clicks. Documents will appear more upscale and be simpler to read if the space between lines is doubled. How to double space on google docs

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