From: Andrea Cantinotti (Andrea.Cantinotti@isdc-dfjp.unil.ch)
Date: Fri May 23 2008 - 01:34:44 CDT
As a young french (and I think it's true for the "Microsoft Word generation"), I do not put a typografical space before ";". Because of the software (Word do it for you, and afterthat, you have'nt any habitude to type it). In my mails, there isn't any space before it.
It is true for my generation, but the older generation type a space before ";" even in e-mails.
-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of John Hudson
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 1:57 AM
Cc: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: Exemplifying apostrophes
Michael Everson wrote:
>> Which was a Victorian fad, not seen before or since in quality English
>> typography.
> Victorian? I never heard that before.
Go look at British popular, i.e. mass-produced, books from the mid- to
late-1800s. This is the only period I know of in which one sees
widespread use of double spaces after full stops in the context of
typeset text. Following the revival of interest in renaissance
typographic models that arose out of the Kelmscott, Doves and other
private presses of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and encouraged by the
significant scholarship on typographic history from the 1920s onwards,
this practice quickly disappeared.
> When I learned typing in junior high school I remember they told us that
> the two spaces where to help typesetters navigate a document from
> typescript and know where sentence ends were.
And after the 19th century, the first thing those typesetters would have
done would have been to remove the extra spaces.
I can see that, if one were preparing a typescript for manual or
mechanical typesetting, double spaces might be helpful to the typsetter.
But seriously, how many junior high school typing students would
actually be expected to go on to prepare typescripts for typesetting?
That's a fairly narrow professional field, and most typewritten
documents were intended for reading as such -- business correspondence,
memos, etc. --, not for typesetting.
JH
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com Nobody can possibly know the reach of language, whether liturgical or otherwise, so one should just keep going until one is too exhausted to go any further. - Catherine Pickstock
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