Blame it all on the typewriter. Before the typewriter, all printed text came through a print house, with trained people. The typewriter introduced the printed page to the average business person. But it had its faults, which were mainly due to the limited number of keys that humans could reach with 10 digits, within the simplified mechanics of the day.
One of the major problems was that the beautiful proportional font mechanism of professionally printed material could not be accommodated with the typewriter. So a period (.) took up the same amount of space as an em (M). All characters were the same size -- monospaced. The automatic clumping of letters into words did not exist. So one of the ways it was made easier to read, was to introduce some new conventions, which still pervade in the business world. One of them was to put two spaces at the end of a sentence. Another was to put an extra line at the end of a paragraph, to split paragraphs. This latter was combined with the no indent convention for a paragraph. Maybe that came about because setting the tab on a typewriter was a complex task for the typist, and they could not count 5 spaces accurately every time they started a new paragraph. The use of underlines to indicate titles was necessitated because italics were not possible on a typewriter, and English has, of yet, not developed a delimiting character set for titles. We do have quotes for chapter and article titles. But then, we use, on a typewriter, the same characters to indicate actual speech. It gets really difficult to indicate quotes within a chapter title. One solution is to use both single and double quotes. The single quote character used at both ends of the delimited text came about because it required only one key, not two, on the keyboard. That was the death knell for the curly quotes, until the computer screen came along. To make it even more awkward, with the introduction of computerized printouts, two characters became common at the end of a line. (It has nothing to do with a paragraph.) This came about because the ASCII character 13 meant end of line. The printer would then automatically slide the print head to the beginning of the line. The computer would then direct the printer to move the print head forward an appropriate amount and stick in underlines, diacriticals, and the like. Then the ASCII character 10 would be sent directing the printer to roll up the paper to the next line. A typist had to do the same sort of thing. They tended to use the backspace to move backwards to add the underlines and diacriticals. Then they pulled that magic handle with their right hand which automatically slide the paper up a line and the page to the right edge. Note that printers move the print head, typists move the paper. But, new inventions came along, including electric typewriters that moved the print head. To this day, the use of ASCII character 13 has not yet been standardized. Apple Computers use it to indicate the end of a paragraph, whereas Microsoft computers use it together with character 10 to indicate the end of a paragraph. But many eMail programs insert one or the other automatically at the end of a line, assuming line lengths of 60, 80, 120 or whatever. To put it succinctly: Copy and Paste between programs and/or operating systems with simple text is not simple! There are no universally accepted conventions. Nor are there likely to be within the foreseeable future. And the English language has a lot more than 26 characters, in spite of what your teachers may have told you. Doug On 2010-04-25, at 2:20 PM, Alex Hough wrote: > Hi Craig, > > Hold the horses before detailing the requests! > > I think the solution to this problem lies with convincing the user > group that single spaces between sentences is *the* way to go instead > of accommodating their request. It is a fact that any professional > document – a newspaper, a book – does have only one space after a > sentence. Thanks to Typography for Lawyers [1] for pointing this out > to me. TW automatically changes double spaces to single, and this has > caused a glitch in our proofing system. > > Curly quotes are new to me. They are different to straight quotes. To > illustrate compare the two quotes: > "This is the one", sang the Stone Roses > “This is the one”, sang the Stone Roses > > The latter uses curly quotes. > > “I don't like those ‘tadpole quotes’ you are using”, said the proof reader > "But I am not using 'em", I said. > > The truth was that both proof reader and I were (kind of) right. I > think Word was converting cut and pasted TiddlyText containing my > straight quotes into curly quotes because Word thought the that was > the thing that the proof reader wanted. It was not. However, looking > into the issue, I have found out about the curly quote, and I have > become a fan. I'm seeing them everywhere now. > > “Curly quotes are cool!”, said Dan from Galooph this morning > “But how do you make them”, I said. > Dan opened terminal on is Mac. > “alt open square bracket for the opening quote and shift alt square > bracket to close”, he explained showing the effects as he typed. > > Thanks for all the help. I think I am on track now. > > ALex > ps More details here about quotes here: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Typing_quotation_marks_on_a_computer_keyboard > > > > > > > > On 24 April 2010 18:15, whatever <kbrezov...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Does this help: >> http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/browse_thread/thread/c494323149288239/7fcf98e415b75150 >> It's a Word macro for converting formated text to tiddlywiki style. It >> could be modified to suit your formatting requirements. >> w >> >> On Apr 24, 4:45 pm, Craig in Calgary <craig.prich...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Alex, >>> >>> I'll post a reply detailing how to accomplish both requests later >>> today. Right now I have to go to my daughter's convocation. >>> >>> Craig >>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >>> "TiddlyWiki" group. >>> To post to this group, send email to tiddlyw...@googlegroups.com. >>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >>> For more options, visit this group >>> athttp://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "TiddlyWiki" group. >> To post to this group, send email to tiddlyw...@googlegroups.com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en. >> >> > > > > -- > http://www.multiurl.com/g/64 > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TiddlyWiki" group. > To post to this group, send email to tiddlyw...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to tiddlyw...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en.
