Feb 22

Written by: Matthew Hile
2/22/2007 11:51 AM

In the old days of fixed font typewriters the period at the end of a sentence was always followed by two spaces. With the advent of proportional spaced fonts this convention is no longer appropriate as the system automatically adjusts to the appropriate period following spacing. (It is particularly a problem if you convert a word document into a HTML file. You end of with lots of extraneous non breaking spaces.) Nonetheless this convention is built into the DNA of long time typists and hard to change. Fortunately, there is a setting in Microsoft's Word (version 2000 and up) that tells the grammar checker to look for this error and flag it for correction.

In general select the Tools/Options/Spelling and Grammer. In the Grammer section you can make sure that the system checks for the appropriate number of spaces. The screen shot below shows this dialogue for Word 2004.

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