I'm American, and use "spelt" in the sense of "spelled" all the time. I guess I'm particularly fond of archaisms though, especially British ligatures as in "foetid" and "faeces." Enough s**tposting though.

Walls of text make my eyes glaze over. When I write long sentences, I'll often begin a new paragraph after as few as one or two sentences.

Whitespace is important. There's a reason 50% of a typical printed page is blank margins. There's also what I call "verbal whitespace." Many Millennials and Zoomers on YouTube talk very fast, and remove all of the pauses in editing, resulting in a continuous ten-minute stream of speech. I get listening fatigue from that very quickly and quit watching. Breathe, kid.

And it's a problem I'm having in another long-term project: scanning my entire collection of books into electronic form (I have no qualms if scans are already available, but I refuse to pay again for works I already own).

The problem is subtle: OCR programs either produce a complete replication of a page, down to font size and position, or simply transcribe text as a block. The first type tend to produce output which basically breaks when converted to epub files (e.g. individual styles for each line in a book!); the second loses the semantic information implicit in text position and spacing on a page. The white space is important!

Annoyingly, ABBYY have chosen to end support on my lifetime subscription and I can no longer transfer it to a new machine. It had an output which included the position of a line on a page so empty lines could be inferred. Tesseract 4, which is better than ABBYY in terms of recognition, simply returns text a line at a time, doesn't always return empty lines, and requires an amount of post-recognition processing to regain that lost semantic content.

As I said, white space is important. End of paragraph is not the same as end of line that happened to end with punctuation, and it's not the same as end of scene.

Neil

While I enjoy writing, and may even be good at writing clear, concise documentation, my main concern in taking on any kind of creative project would be scope creep and moving goalposts. That happened to me more often than I cared for in my Web development career. No matter how detailed the initial agreement, customers would often be dissatisfied with the results of the agreed upon plan, or say what they really wanted was something other than what I understood them to say, or wanted something more that they hadn't considered. For free, of course.

I'm a fan of everything having a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I don't like committing to something, only to find out once I'm in it that it's going to drag on for longer than anticipated. I like to deliver what was promised as quickly as possible, then move on to the next thing.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I'd venture to say technical writing is more akin to writing a newspaper article than writing a novel. Instead of painting a mental image, a technical document would more likely include unambiguous charts and tables.

If only newspaper articles actually did that...

Haha, I cannot watch most videos on Youtube without 1.5x or 2x speed now! It's just all so... slow normally. Only a very very few can I watch at 1x speed.

Chad

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

MyBB automatically inserts   when the user types more than one consecutive space. Does vBulletin not do that?

Another thing I've noticed about both American and British young people is that they put the emphasis on a different syllable in words like "contribute" and "distribute" than we used to. It just sounds odd.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Be cautious about double spaces between sentences. The typesetter would argue that it should not be a double-space but rather a *wider* space.

A sensible document processor like LyX won't even let you type in two successive spaces, but will automatically maintain a proper proportion with a wider gap between sentences than between words. (Another convention it enforces[1] is that of the first paragraph of a chapter having no indent while all successive paragraphs are indented, and no extra vertical space between paragraphs. Yet it is equally valid - particularly in a multi-column magazine article, for example, or on a forum such as this where the page width is undefined - to use vertical space between paragraphs and no indentation.)

This is of course all culturally defined. It's only recently - in terms of history; a few hundred years - that English clearly separated individual words. How the word fits on a page is a matter of convention and taste; two spaces appeared only with the invention of the typewriter and then only because Scholes/Remington came up with a single space bar (and other simplifications like no zero or one digits).

But the critical importance in getting words on paper is getting people to read them. The typesetting chosen should not get in the way and if possible it should make the content easier to understand; ideally I would suggest that you shouldn't notice it at all!

Neil

[1] Unless you tell it otherwise, of course. Its main aim is consistency of style, and not the bizarre mish-mash that can occur when people manage individual characters in a 'word processor'. Word processors do the same to words as food processors do to food: in unskilled hands the result in either case can be completely inedible.

Line break after every sentence!

(from https://xkcd.com/1285/)

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probably the youngest person on this forum