At 00:05 25/01/2008 +1100, Lindsay Graham wrote:
In Writer, if I turn on Nonprinting Characters, all the spaces appear as raised dots. All, that is, except the space at the end of the line. Why is that space not visible?
I can't speak for the creators of OpenOffice, so I can't tell you why. But I can tell you that I think it's a Good Idea.
The best way to think of the space bar is not that it inserts a space into the text stream (as it would on a typewriter), but that it indicates the break between words. It signals, that is, the end of one word and the beginning of another. Clearly this means that there will have to be some space between the two words in the formatted resulting text - but only if they appear on the same line. If the word break transpires to be at an automatic line break, there will - indeed, should be - no visible space. In this case, the space bar has done its job of indicating that a line break can occur here, but has not added any actual space.
If I had my way, word processors would not allow you to enter spacing by repeated use of the space bar: instead, multiple consecutive presses of the space bar would have the same effect as a single press. Each action would indicate the break between words and no more. It is rather like setting italic: if you do it twice, you get only normal italics, not letters leaning over at a more alarming angle. And setting 12 point twice over leaves you at 12 point, not 24 point (or 144 point?).
Whilst the present philosophy reigns, though, I accept that there are occasions when it can be confusing trying to discover what is happening if you cannot see that someone (I hope it wasn't you!) has typed multiple spaces at a point that became a line break.
I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
