Writing update from late-December

[ddelapp]

This is a writing update, written on December 23rd

Comments

[brisrealm]

yay! go, devon, go!

now post about ellen - i know you have a napkin full of notes!!

[ddelapp]

Workin' on it...

[boobirdsfly]

Are you writing a play or a screenplay ?

[ddelapp]

Screenplay.

[evan]

two spaces v one: i thought you were a designer, man! i've been told that visually you're supposed to have a space that's larger than the interword spacing, so in the typewriter days people simulated it with two spaces. in fancy document layout (e.g. TeX) sentence-ending periods are different than abbreviation-periods because the former can be stretched when the line isn't wide enough; see my pdf at http://neugierig.org/content/dfw/ .

[ddelapp]

Ah, this I have no doubt about. As it was taught to me, the space between words is referred to as an "en-space" (similar to an "en-dash"), which is half the width of the type, or about equal to the width of an "n". Following a period, an "em-space" is to be used, which is equal to the full-width of the the type, or about the width of an "m". My question was meant as an open poll, to see what others preferred.

For fancy document layout though, that DFW pdf looks very nice. I'm scared/don't understand TeX, though.

[evan]

TeX takes a bit of love and is sorta needlessly opaque sometimes but it's not much harder than HTML as long as you're doing something it wants you to do. (It's much less nice than HTML, though, if you want to do anything out of the ordinary -- but that sorta comes with the territory, as you describe your document in higher-level concepts like "paragraphs" and "chapters" and it determines the pagination, etc.)

[zedsaid]

I do as my grammar teacher taught me, two spaces between sentences.

[ddelapp]

As described above, this is derived from monospaced typewriters. A single space is appropriate for most other text (but still do two spaces in screenplays, generally).

[zedsaid]

you were taking a poll, i was answering... the entymology may be interesting, but long before i touched keyboard, or could tell the difference between a cursive Q and a 2, i was taught that the space between sentences was bigger than the space between words. (your em-space, or whatever you called it [i'm answering in email and can't be bothered to check what i read earlier]).

[halbe]

Thanks for brining the gift to me for Heather. You're such a sweetheart.

[ddelapp]

No prob, babe.