There is even an ongoing meme with a woman crying “I don’t deserve such treatment, that’s how I’ve always written” when her flawless typography was considered ChatGPT in the making:
Wikipedia articles, and encyclopedia articles in general, are not meant to be "proper long-read" articles. They're meant to be short, descriptive passages that give you enough of an overview to know what the subject is, and directions on where to find more information should you want it. This is not a sorry excuse, it's just the nature of what an encyclopedia is.
FYI, you don't even need browser translation. The piece already has an English version available. There's a language toggle in the navigation bar, and the English version is here: https://type.today/en/journal/spaces
Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false authority. A surprisingly large majority of public communications fall in to this category. Mastering this puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to waste a life.
> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.
Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?
I thought it was weirdly written, too. Why is the CSS property that controls it worth mentioning in the opening paragraph, and wtf is "standardized digital typography"?
There's lots of questionable stuff on this page. I particularly objected to this which clearly isn't true in most English speech:
"Word spacing is crucial for the written form because it illustrates the sound of speech where audible gaps or pauses take place."
If I were reading it aloud, even for a presentation, the spaces between morphemes would be more like this:
"Wordspacing iscru'cial forthewri'ttenform be'cause itill'ustrates thesoun'dofspeech where audiblegaps or pauses takeplace."
where a ' is a shorted pause than a space. The length of the ' isn't really long enough to be called out as a pause, but it's definitely longer than between words which frequently run directly into the next.
Spacing is important, but it's as an aid to parsing a written sentence at speed, and almost nothing to do with showing the pauses between morphemes.
I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead⸱of⸱putting⸱spaces⸱you⸱put⸱a⸱small⸱dot⸱between⸱words⸱instead.
I love that better! I was also just in Italy recently and you made me double take this tablet hanging on a canopy in one of the peregrination churches and they ARE interpuncts but for names only
Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters”
> Factoids are things which resemble facts, but aren't actually facts.
I think you might be right but not definitively so: the Oxford dictionary has your definition, as does the New Oxford American dictionary which also lists the following as North American usage:
OT: Urdu, like Arabic/Persian, is written with an alphabet where letters can change shape based on whether they are at the start, middle or end of a "word" [1]. I say "word" because some letters don't have a middle form, so each actual word is broken into a sequence of composite-letter-shapes, where each composite shape start with such a no-middle-form letter.
A problem arises when one wants to write a compound word, which the last letter for the first word and the first letter of the second word must not be joined. To achieve this, the unicode standard has U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER character, which should be used in such compound words [2]. The standard SPACE character should not be used because it will create a physical space, while U+200C will create a break with no space.
However, typically Urdu keyboards don't have this character in them, so everyone ends up either using SPACE or just joining the words.
Readit News
Manual: Spaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199530
Albeit in Russian, all modern browsers support live translation — should be fine.
https://type.today/ru/journal/spaces
Update: in English https://type.today/en/journal/spaces
—
BTW typography is very important to Russian designers and developers.
Many install special typography layout (with “right alt” layer for the symbols) to always enter correct m-dashes, quotes, and what have you.
https://ilyabirman.ru/typography-layout/
There is even an ongoing meme with a woman crying “I don’t deserve such treatment, that’s how I’ve always written” when her flawless typography was considered ChatGPT in the making:
https://youtube.com/shorts/IrhFP67-_vA?si=n9UICaRQ9ZiUyVuT
Dashes article is ok though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
Deleted Comment
Also, liked the article!
> It is hard to determine how much spacing should be put in between words, but a good typographer is able to determine proper spacing.[3]
> Since the fifteenth century, the best work shows that text is to be read smoothly and efficiently.[4]
> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.
Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?
"Word spacing is crucial for the written form because it illustrates the sound of speech where audible gaps or pauses take place."
If I were reading it aloud, even for a presentation, the spaces between morphemes would be more like this:
"Wordspacing iscru'cial forthewri'ttenform be'cause itill'ustrates thesoun'dofspeech where audiblegaps or pauses takeplace."
where a ' is a shorted pause than a space. The length of the ' isn't really long enough to be called out as a pause, but it's definitely longer than between words which frequently run directly into the next.
Spacing is important, but it's as an aid to parsing a written sentence at speed, and almost nothing to do with showing the pauses between morphemes.
The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html
https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu
The whole -oid suffix, really. Asteroids aren't really stars, meteoroids aren't really meteors, androids aren't really men, spheroids aren't really spheres, factoids aren't really facts, etc.
I think you might be right but not definitively so: the Oxford dictionary has your definition, as does the New Oxford American dictionary which also lists the following as North American usage:
> a brief or trivial item of news or information
I'll add "factoid."
A problem arises when one wants to write a compound word, which the last letter for the first word and the first letter of the second word must not be joined. To achieve this, the unicode standard has U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER character, which should be used in such compound words [2]. The standard SPACE character should not be used because it will create a physical space, while U+200C will create a break with no space.
However, typically Urdu keyboards don't have this character in them, so everyone ends up either using SPACE or just joining the words.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner