Hmmm. Let's try this .

Yup , word pudding again ! Darned ! !

Tankerbuilder, on my phone I can see only two problems with that post.

One - it all appears as one paragraph. If that's how you typed it, no problem. If you wanted to break it up into more than one paragraph, I wonder if you're trying to make the program do something it won't do. (At least mine won't.) For me, indenting the first line of a paragraph doesn't work. Instead, when you want to end a paragraph, hit the "enter" key (or the "return" key - whichever your machine has) TWICE. And only twice. That'll make a gap between the last line of the first paragraph and the first line of the next paragraph. Like this:

Two - in your original post there's a space in front of every punctuation mark. Don't hit the space bar before you hit a punctuation mark key. And after the punctuation mark, just hit the space bar once.

I, like lots of other folks, was taught to space twice after a period or colon. Modern computers aren't set up to handle that.

I know from experience that double-spacing after periods occasionally makes odd things happen. And they happen to me pretty frequently. The habits pounded in by that high school typing teacher die hard.

The bottom line seems to be: never hit the space bar more than once, and always hit the "enter" (or "return" key twice.

Otherwise, at least on my I-phone, your original post looks fine.

Same at my end. Aside from the spaces before punctuation (which I hadn't noticed before jtilley mentioned it) and one big paragraph, it looks fine.

Go try that other browser. Chrome is fine, or you might want to try Mozilla Firefox. It is very popular, and is my browser of choice for the past 15 or whatever years.

I use Mozilla Firefox. It's easy to use, and it's free. I switched to it after I had some trouble paying for some stuff I ordered from a website. Its customer service rep pointed me to Firefox. Setting it up took less than a minute.

But I wonder if the two suggestions I made in my last post may solve Tankerbuilder's problem. One - to start a new paragraph, hit the "enter" (or "return") key twice. (And don't hit the space bar at all.) Two - don't hit the space bar before a punctuation mark - and hit it only once after the punctuation mark.

Same here Tankerbuilder. I'd take Prof. Tilley's advice and see how it goes. Everything looked fine here and I hadn't even noticed the punctuation marks.

Jim 

The old standard procedure of spacing twice after the period (or colon) is pretty much gone nowadays in professional writing circles. I found that out some years back when I chewed out a grad student for not doing it in a draft of his MA thesis. He challenged me, and showed me the relevant page in the Chicago Manual of Style (the ultimate authority on such things, at least in the history field). He was right. In my 31 years of teaching, that was one of two times a student took me on regarding style and mechanics - and won. (The other had to do with state abbreviations in footnotes - Mass. vs. MA.)

I think the reason for the change is that modern computers have automatic kerning. On old-fashioned typewriters an I took up less space than an M; only a printer, with his letters on tiny metal or wood blocks, could make a line of type look like we take for granted.  Old fashioned typists were taught to hit the space bar twice after the period, because the text would otherwise be hard to read.

Nowadays, the standard computer takes care of kerning automatically. And if you space twice after a period - at least on this program - and the period happens to be at the end of a line, the next line will be indented by a space. I think Tankerbuilder may have been a little careless with his spacing.

I'm trying now, near the end of my career, to break the old habit. But such habits are tough to overcome.

I learned to type when I was a junior in high school, in 1967. I hated that class; my father, a university professor, made me take it. He said I'd need it, and he was right. Another of his pieces of advice was, "Never ask a secretary to do anything you can do yourself." The old man was right on that one, too.

This is a test of how one space vs. two spaces looks.  IMO, two spaces after the period makes it easier to read.

ONE SPACE:

Designed in response to a Bureau of Aeronautics request for proposal in February 1938, for a single-engine fighter with a top speed over 350 mph, a landing speed of 70 mph and a range of 1,000 miles, Vought's XF4U-1 Corsair was supposed to become the Navy's fleet defense fighter for the war in the Pacific everyone knew was coming sooner or later. When it first flew in 1940, powered by the first Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine, which had been designed specifically for the F4U, it was the first fighter in the world capable of 400 mph in level flight. Named the Corsair, it was the first carrier‑based fighter to have a performance superior to its potential land‑based opponents.

After an early crash allowed changes in the weapons system during the rebuild, the requirement for carrying air-dropped bombs in the wings was dropped, while the 4-gun armament was changed to 6 weapons, three in each wing. This meant the fuel tanks had  to be moved from the wing, while remaining on the center of gravity. This resulted in the relocation of the cockpit aft to increase fuel in the fuselage tank. This severely restricted the pilot's view during the all‑important maneuver of landing aboard a carrier, with the airplane gaining the names “Old Hosenose” and “Ensign Eliminator”. When that was coupled with overly‑stiff landing gear that had a propensity to bounce when landed aboard by less than an expert pilot, the Navy decided that as good as the airplane was, it was too much of a handful for the average wartime‑trained Navy fighter pilot to safely and consistently operate from the restricted deck of an aircraft carrier and substituted the Grumman Hellcat for the Corsair aboard ship.

TWO SPACES:

Designed in response to a Bureau of Aeronautics request for proposal in February 1938, for a single-engine fighter with a top speed over 350 mph, a landing speed of 70 mph and a range of 1,000 miles, Vought's XF4U-1 Corsair was supposed to become the Navy's fleet defense fighter for the war in the Pacific everyone knew was coming sooner or later.  When it first flew in 1940, powered by the first Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine, which had been designed specifically for the F4U, it was the first fighter in the world capable of 400 mph in level flight.  Named the Corsair, it was the first carrier‑based fighter to have a performance superior to its potential land‑based opponents.

After an early crash allowed changes in the weapons system during the rebuild, the requirement for carrying air-dropped bombs in the wings was dropped, while the 4-gun armament was changed to 6 weapons, three in each wing.  This meant the fuel tanks had  to be moved from the wing, while remaining on the center of gravity.  This resulted in the relocation of the cockpit aft to increase fuel in the fuselage tank.  This severely restricted the pilot's view during the all‑important maneuver of landing aboard a carrier, with the airplane gaining the names “Old Hosenose” and “Ensign Eliminator”.  When that was coupled with overly‑stiff landing gear that had a propensity to bounce when landed aboard by less than an expert pilot, the Navy decided that as good as the airplane was, it was too much of a handful for the average wartime‑trained Navy fighter pilot to safely and consistently operate from the restricted deck of an aircraft carrier and substituted the Grumman Hellcat for the Corsair aboard ship.

Blueline, I happen to agree with you, but you and I don't make the rules for publishers or software manufacturers. If you look carefully at your test paragraphs, you'll see that in the one with two spaces after each period, the fifth line of the last paragraph is indented by one space. The same thing happened in the second line of the post. ("IMO" doesn't line up with "This.") you didn't cause those indentations; FSM's program did.

In the paragraph in which you spaced once after each period, all the lines line up perfectly.

Later edit: when I typed the preceding paragraph I was working with my I-phone.  I'm now looking at my Mac screen.  The layout of Blueline's post is completely different; all the lines in both his paragraphs are lined up perfectly.  So maybe much of the spacing problem comes from my I-phone.

But Tankerbuilder's posts have spacing errors in them on both my devices.

I don't know whether any major publisher has started rejecting manuscripts with two spaces after each period - but I wouldn't be surprised. Some journals now refuse to accept "ibid." in footnotes.

This certainly isn't the biggest of big deals. But Tankerbuilder has been having trouble with spacing in his posts, and I think this is one of the reasons.

I certainly agree with you on one big point: the FSM Forum would look a lot better, and be easier to read, if contributors would spend a few minutes proof reading. I think I can claim that I always proof my posts before I submit them. But far too many flubs get past my 63-year-old eyes; when I look over them a few hours later I'm often embarrassed. I hate to think what my posts would look like if I didn't proof them.