post punctuation whitespace protcols

[expense-of-spirit]

The Literotica convention appears to be a single space after a terminal punctutaion mark. Both on a priori grounds, and on the basis of my limited research on the reception of text under different space proocols, I suggest that a listing comma separator be followed by one space, an element comma separator, or a colon or semi colon, by two spaces, and a period (or its equivalent) by three spaces. Such a visual aid arguably assists the reader in navigating and processing text.

A simple Word macro can assist editing by first highlighting all punctuation marks, say bold 14 point, and then by replacing all post punctuation mark whitespaces by a set number of spaces for each punctuation mark. Such a macro would help remove two bad charactertistics of most text: inconsistent punctuation and variable whitespacing.

 

[snooper]

In Word forget custom macros. Go to Tools - Options - Spelling and Grammar - Grammar Settings - Require, and set the bottom option to the spacing you want. The middle option in this section allows you to mispunctuate quotations deliberately if you want!

 

[expense-of-spirit]

Thanks, but macros still live. The Word menu does not distinguish between the order of punctuation marks, nor does it allow more than 2 spaces after a mark. This is arguably a major weakness as the amount of processing by the reader after a listing comma is at most a third of that after a sentence terminal mark. Further, the Word menu does not accommodate the highlighting (by bolding and increasing pointage) of punctuation marks, which my students and I find to be a very efficient method of catching inconsistencies in our punctuation. So I still recommend the simple macro, although a few lines of Perl is (sic) much much faster and quietly elegant.

 

[BlackSnake]

I hope this will help.

It is text conversion not a convention that causes single spaces. With HTML, you will need to place 8 (_nbsp to make 2 regular spaces. That's really crappie coding and could become problematic. I can only assume that this site is driven by MYSQL, if it is then character conversion maybe taking place. Reasons:

quote marks will never fly in a SQL statement. INSERT INTO MYDBTABLE (MYTEXT) VALUES ('"He said, "Let's go to the mall and get you a new pair of panties."') This will alway cause a database error, special characters including HTML tags need to be converted to something non-threatening to the database before INSERT or UPDATE can occur.

 

[expense-of-spirit]

Thanks - and sorry for delay in replying to your helpful comment. I was unaware of the HTML aspects, and am pleased that visual clouding of the order of punctuation marks is not necessarily based on stylistic grounds, but may reflect a trade-off between programming elegance and literary elegance.

 

[HawaiiBill]

Punctuation and spacing

Typography is allowed to be flexible but its general practices have been
growing since Gutenberg came up with movable type and it is unlikely
that changes will be made in those established standards.

The only style I know where more than one space is countenanced is
when text is prepared on a fixed-width machine, a typewriter,
say, with only courier at play. The double spaces after a period in
that case are to help the eye differentiate between a comma and a
period in the old clickety-clack typewriters where no letter was as
clear as every letter in today's modern machines.

After-period double spacing was never used with variable width type.
The reason for that is simple economy of each typeset line length.
While the width of a book line wouldn't seem to matter much, the
number of spaces available in a narrow column -- newspapers are very
important here -- make every space fraction important. A blank space
is the width equivalent of a lower-case 'n' in most usage.

Where type is justified this becomes important because every fraction of
space may be needed in micro-spacing to bring all lines
into the same length. You may have to think about that a bit if you
haven't spent much time setting type. These days computers do all
that automatically. If you want to experiment to see what can happen
with your two or three spaces down a paragraph of type, you will notice
that some lines wind up with words l i k e that. Letters get spread
to fill in the spaces and that CAN be because of too much space being
pre-empted by forced spacing after punctuation. Once you key in a
blank space, it stays in.

The above isn't only me talking, it's every typography principle long
established and in play in virtually every justification algorithm at play
world-wide. Were you to desire to set that book you finished writing
last night with different rules -- two spaces after each period -- the
additional cost for the necessary typography would change your mind.

These rules of typography have nothing to do with database structure
unless they were introduced in very special private circumstances.
Literotica uses whichever justification algorithm exists in the system
purchased for the web site. When you copy and paste text from
Literotica, you do not find a knot of coding within the text you paste.

Happy New Year.

 

[snooper]

Re: Punctuation and spacing

... When you copy and paste text from
Literotica, you do not find a knot of coding within the text you paste. ...

This has nothing to do with the justification used. Any piece of HTML will be copied as plain text by the copy command in Windows. It has more to do with the internals of the OS/browser you are using than the source preparation of the material you are sampling.