What about professors - and editors - who only accept Word files?
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There is always money in designing yet another Helvetica derivative.
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Let’s go further! Frankly, we should all be using boustrophedon. It’s easier to read, too.
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Yeah, my eyeballs could get stuck rolled back that way. But actually those were the good old days. Nowadays a good sized chunk of the professionals I do translation or teaching work with email me files from whoever proprietary freebie text editor came on their system _emphasized text_without even knowing what type of file it is or how to change the extension to something more universal.
This is constant; college graduates in their early 30s who use whatever dogsforsaken text editor came on their Mac or even sometimes Windows without the free Word office suite and cannot for the life of them even distinguish the thing from the program- I ask for a text document and they say, “you mean a pages?”/“I can send you a noteytime” or a whatever crap they use that when they sent it looked to them like text on a white page but when I get it is a zip file that upon extraction will only open in geddit and creates four tabs with the text spread between two of them.
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Two spaces after the period FTW.
One spacers? Savages.
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I remember reading about a Classics professor who was delighted to discover that his dot-matrix printer printed boustrophedonically.
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As a graphic designer, I assure you that I cared about stripping double spaces out of client-supplied text before Twitter was a twinkle in the internet’s eye.
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It’s odd coming to this thread after coming from a Youtube thread where one correspondent was ending every sentence with not one, but two ellipses, thus…… And another seemed to be ending paragraphs by typing spaces until the cursor went down to the next line.
Eh, flat-Earthers, what you gonna do?
(Edit for BBS’ parser changing my six dots to three.)
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I. Fffffeeeeeel. You.
Two years ago, I worked on a global database with a lot of contributors. Besides the encoding fuckups, the versioning fuckups, and many more, the fucking document fuckup still haunt me.
I mean, if you provide a contributor a template files, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
You know what. Of course you do.
I can’t count the number of Excel sheets I got with the relevant data highlighted, indented or in some other way rendered completely un-processable for my R scripts. I begged, literally, using the phrase “I beg you”, to get the data in simple .csv or .txt, one file at a time.
Instead, some contributors stalled working on regional files until they had the whole Indian subcontinent finished, and put the regions on the same sheet in Excel. Side by side, highlighted to distinguish regions and sub-regions and COMMENTED in-line what was what.
Oh, and just FTR, if you think this is a problem of young people who don’t care about formats and stuff, never mind tenured professors in their bloom of age. O_o
Also, I left academia and hoped for a more professional approach in the real world. Only to get Adobe Illustrator files instead of georeferenced GIS data. AND THAT IS THE GOOD PART, since I managed to convert .ai to a CAD format, and managed to import THAT into a GIS. You do not want to know about the contents and the meta-data…
ETA: the commas and spaces in sentences might bug me a bit, but don’t ask me further about the non-standard entries in stuff I had to process for GIS an databases. Your space might be important to you, but the human brain is a perfectly capable of ignoring spacings it isn’t familiar with.
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Most useful class I ever took, too! Helped with papers in college and, when I started coding for a living, I could key more quickly than my cohorts. 
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Yep! And now I’m a program manager in the software biz, where I have to do a ton of communicating (to and on behalf of you coders!), mostly via written media. So I type, quicker than most, I believe.
My first year in college, I inherited my older sister’s word processor. It would allow you to type one line at a time, and you could see it in a little LCD window, maybe about forty characters before you’d have to scroll to the right before seeing the rest of the line. Once you were happy with that one line, you hit Print (or whatever it was) and the print head would silently glide across the page, putting that one line down on paper. I didn’t use that device much (I mean, what a PITA!) before getting my first, brand new Mac SE!
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The passion with which some contributors to the journal I edit labor to circumvent the constraints of the LaTeX class file we provide is impressive.
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Two spaces is easier to read, but making the text easier to read is something the computer should do. You don’t do your own kerning. In theory, you should type one space after the period, and the computer should put in enough space between that period and whatever comes next so it looks good.
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I have posted this link before. I will post it again.
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My favorite kerning joke
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Writers use 2.
Coders use 1.
Simple.
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