B5 - Thirdspace

[crazyhorse]

Ah,that explains it.I wont bother asking what HTML is

[Joseph DeMartino]

A new paragraph should always begin with first a space is how I was taught.

The rule I learned was that a new paragraph should be indented, typically five spaces, one standard tab stop. Nowadays formatting rules for letters and much else allow for a "block" appearance to pages and both manuscripts and books often omit the indentation. One space seems hardly enough to notice. (Unless we're still talking at cross purposes you mean a line break when you say "space" instead of a single space on a line.)

And yes, publishers still require manuscripts (which are properly typescripts or computer files these days) to be double-space and to have generous margins, and for exactly the same reason they always did. Books are still edited, just at they are still mostly read, on paper, not on computer screens. (They get physically revised on computers, but that's a different process.) Wide margins and spaces between lines given an editor room to insert comments and revision. Same reason galleys are delivered on large, uncut proof sheets, so the copy editor, editor and writer can make corrections. (In this age of declining standards of literacy many editors and authors spend much of their time restoring things mistakenly "corrected" by the copy editor and/or removing fresh errors introduced by that person. )

Hollywood (and therefore worldwide) script standards are even more anal. Those of you who have been buying the script books might be interested to know that JMS does not type his scripts on an old manual typewriter, nor does he just like the look of fixed-pitch Courier 10 pt. type. Everything about a script page - the font, the size, the margins, what gets typed in ALL CAPS, what always gets centered, what never gets centered and exactly how far everything that gets indented gets indented have become standardized based on the conventions that were found to work for guys who did pound out scripts on battered Remington manauls with fixed-space fonts. There are a number of competing script formatting programs designed to automate a lot of this stuff and relieve the writer of the mechanics of it all. (The best packages also do a lot of other tasks the professional writer needs to do with various degrees of automation, like turning out a "shooting script" where scenes are grouped together by set or location and performers required, which is how they'll be shot in order to save time and money, or producing a list of required sets or props, etc.)

Regards,

Joe

[GaribaldisHair]

It is a quirk of internet browsers to remove extra spaces in HTML. If you put together a page and include a sentence with 4 spaces between each word, invariably the browser will simply interpret it as one space and display the sentence exactly as you would normally type it. I am reliably informed that it does the same with PHP (the language used by vBulletin) ... hence the disappearing "redundant" space at the start of your new paragraphs CH.

And for anyone truly interested in the mechanics of putting together the formatting of a script, JMS goes into it in quite some detail in his Complete Book Of Scriptwriting.

[puzzle]

Collapsing extra whitespace (spaces, tabs, carriage returns, linefeeds) is part of the HTML specification by W3C.

If I remember correctly, you can override it with the "xmp" (example) and "pre" (preformatted) tags, or the "white-space" CSS directive (valid values are currently "normal", "pre" and "nowrap").

Since PHP scripts customarily output HTML, they can use the same techniques to gain fine control over spacing. For example, I bet this forum converts a BBCode "code" tag into preformatted HTML.

testing
   testing
      testing

[ryuu]

ive never been told to use two spaces and i do a ton of story wrighting all the time i indent the first letter of the second paragraph and put an empty line between diferent locations/timescales e.c.t.
b.t.w. isnt this grammar discution a bit off topic?

[A_M_Swallow]

Originally Posted by ryuu

b.t.w. isnt this grammar discution a bit off topic?

Interesting quaetion.
Do we use a third space when writing about Thirdspace.

[ryuu]

depends on the amount of words

[GaribaldisHair]

Originally Posted by ryuu

ive never been told to use two spaces and i do a ton of story wrighting all the time i indent the first letter of the second paragraph and put an empty line between diferent locations/timescales e.c.t.
b.t.w. isnt this grammar discution a bit off topic?

Hopefully when you do your story writing, you do use punctuation, capital letters and a spell-checker ...

[KoshN]

Originally Posted by GaribaldisHair

Hopefully when you do your story writing, you do use punctuation, capital letters and a spell-checker ...

To paraphrase Marcus:

There's always the threat of bad spelling and grammar by say, a giant space dragon,

...It's a nuisance, but what would you expect from reptiles.

[ryuu]

Originally Posted by GaribaldisHair

Hopefully when you do your story writing, you do use punctuation, capital letters and a spell-checker ...

look i am lazy! okay