chappachula, the board software will center text. Go to Advanced, and next to the icons for bold, italics, and inderline, you will see icons to left-justify, center, and right-justify, just as you would see in Microsoft Word, for example. Highlight the desired text and click the icon and it will add tags to center the text. Alternately, you could use [ CENTER][ /CENTER] before and after the text, without the spaces in the brackets, of course.
This research paper is submitted in partial
fullfillment of the requirements
for course number xxx
December 1971
IMHO, two spaces between sentences doesn’t look better or enhance clarity, which is probably why virtually every bit of typeset print that everyone here has ever read in their lives only has a single space between sentences. Look at any professionally-produced magazine or book if you don’t believe me.
You only see two spaces in monospaced, typed documents and word-processed documents by people who still think that the modern word processor is a typewriter.
I invoked the Spell of Naming, or whateverthehell the command was. Shelly the shillelagh, Betty the butterfly, Terry the pterodactyl, all had short, easy to remember names, because I’d have to manipulate them several times during the game. Remember that there were five potions, and three of them were good? You’d see a grey potion on the ground, and rather than ask Y’Gael at the magic shop, you could type in “Take death” and if the potion was Death, then you’d pick it up. If it wasn’t death, the game would inform you that it wasn’t there. Similarly, if I wanted to find out what that stick was, I’d say “Take Annihilation”, and most of the time, that didn’t work either.
The butterfly could be taken from the chalice and sold separately at one of the shops. I always took the nectar (which raised luck) when the chalice was offered to me, and then refused to take the chalice itself and let the Implementators throw me off the Plane of Ascii. I know that I could taste the nectar afterwards, it was just more fun to get the various messages while waiting for them to throw me out when I wouldn’t accept the cup. OK, I guess I should quit turning that crank right while the dial is on the clock.
Note for those who think the SDMB removes double spaces: when Web browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari…) render HTML, “white space” (spaces, newlines, etc.) are combined into a single space. If you type “Invisible (space) (space) (enter) (space) Wombat”, it will come out as “Invisible Wombat” unless you specifically code non-breaking spaces to prevent this behavior. This has been true since the Web’s first browsers were in beta test.
Two spaces after a period has never been the standard for typeset material. It was only for typing. It’s not just that books, magazines, newspapers, brochures, and so forth use one space now. They’ve used one space since the days of hot type. And, as mentioned above, Web pages have had single spaces at the end of sentences since the beginning.
And you get twitchy every single time you read professionally-typeset materials? Wow.
ETA: Lynn, remember the bug with the crocodile? Where there’s a crocodile statute you need to climb, but a crocodile enemy who will eat you? And you fall into the statue’s mouth, and say “exit crocodile” and it tells you you can’t see that? And the same thing happens with “exit statue” and even just “exit”? Hoo boy. Memories.
I have always assumed that the reason it’s done on this board is because HTML removes extra spaces. To see what I mean, open notepad and type a sentence with a bunch of spaces between the words. Save the file to your desktop as filename.htm, and double click on the file. All the words will be one space apart.
Hmmmm, I don’t remember trying to exit the statue that way. I exited the statue using either Word of Recall or pointing the wand of eversion at the statue. I’ll have to play the game again (I got the Infocom Masterpieces disk) and see if the wand works on the statue.
Bah, I could care less what the MLA thinks, that’s for English teacher and English majors. Many other professions, mine included, use alternate style guides or have their own.
I double space when using a monospaced font (for my manuscripts) and single space when using a proportional font. I switch from one to the other without even thinking about it.
Note that books, magazines, etc. do not use a single space after a period. Since they’re justified, they use enough extra space to justify the line. The space varies slightly each time.
False. It is true that justified text displays and prints in the manner you describe. But the underlying ASCII, ANSI, or Unicode context is “T h e [space] c a t [space] s a t [space] o n [space] t h e [space] m a t [period] [space]” All the spacing is expanded proportionally to justify the line – including both interword and interletter spacing. That’s why narrow-column text including phrases like “unconstitutionally prestidigitatious” displays so bizarrely
I learned to type in 7th grade, 1979-ish, and double spacing was the norm then.
In the engineering field we use abbreviations quite a bit and that was the reason for double-spacing after a period.
Honestly, I had never noticed that html coding removed the double-space after a period, but on my CAD documents, I always notice when someone doesn’t double space after a period. I had no idea that the standard had changed.
Add me to the list of people saying “Huh? When did people stop?” I had no clue that any standard had changed. Then again, with all the texting making most writing online illegible to me, spacing hadn’t entered my mind.
Really? It has changed? Damnit, I’m a dinosaur! Double space until I die baby. I can’t even imagine trying to stop, I don’t even think about it.
Boy, talk about a convoluted opening statement (from the wikipedia article)! It reads:
Double-spacing is called “English spacing.” Except since the 1990s, when it spontaneously became known as French spacing. Oh yeah, single spacing is called French spacing, too. In fact, if there’s a space in your reading material, the French had something to do with it.
I don’t know if Walloon works in the business or not, but it does get frustrating explaining these things over and over to people who think that just because they were taught to use two spaces after a period on a typewriter, that it applied everywhere.
Every professional editor I know has a macro in Microsoft Word (or whatever equivalent they use) that strips the double spaces, fixes quote marks, and so forth. Double spaces after periods have never been the standard for professionally-typeset material, but it seems like a huge number of writers never figured this out.
Those of us in the trade have been explaining this to people ever since desktop publishing came about a quarter-century ago, and it gets wearying that people still pop up and say, “what’s this new style where you only put one space after periods?”