Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 August 4

= August 4 =

¿Investigador o auxiliar de investigación?
I tried searching the correct term for "research assistant" in SpanishDict, but I ended up with two different terms. It seems to me that investigador actually means researcher, not research assistant. So, I think I should use auxiliar de investigación for research assistant. Also, when it comes to technical terms of esoteric knowledge, SpanishDict doesn't work. Binomial nomenclature is in Greek or Latin, so I'd presume that they can be used universally. But technical terms seem to be a different ballpark. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 01:47, 4 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Investigador is fine for investigator. As an adjective, investigador means researching or investigating, but as a noun it is investigator or researcher. The English word "investigator" is almost always translated into Spanish as investigador. Another good word is indagador, which means investigator, inquirer, examiner, interrogator. —Stephen (talk) 05:52, 4 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Auxiliar de investigación is fine, but I personally see asistente de investigación more often. Here's a job posting using the latter.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 05:56, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Typing one space or two?
When I was in middle school, I was taught by some kind of typing program to type with both hands. For some reason, the program always required me to use 2 spaces instead of 1 after the period. I am just wondering what rule this is based on. Anyway, I still use 1 space after the period. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 21:08, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I was taught two spaces, and I still consider this the far superior way. The main reason is that it makes it easier visually to break a chunk of text into sentences.  A secondary reason is to distinguish periods used to indicate abbreviations from those that end sentences.
 * Unfortunately the trend has been in the one-space direction. There is an article, in my opinion quite biased, called sentence spacing, on this very subject.  I haven't read it recently because I got disgusted with it; I don't know whether it has been made more reasonable. --Trovatore (talk) 21:30, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Two points. First, if you do it, it's extra space after a sentence, not a period. Not all sentences end in a period!  And not all periods end sentences.  Second, this conflict of opinions was settled&mdash;in my opinion the wrong way&mdash;when HTML was designed, because it does not provide for any way to mark the end of a sentence.  So if you put an extra space after each sentence in your HTML, it just disappears in the formatted output.  And wikitext works the same way: I'm typing those extra spaces now, but you aren't seeing them in the output.  (Yes, HTML and wikitext provide , but it's not the same thing: extra space after a sentence is supposed to disappear if it occurs at a line break, whereas   always produces a space.)  --69.159.60.147 (talk) 21:54, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, not all text is HTML. I agree, this was a bad design decision on the part of HTML.  LaTeX (or maybe TeX in general) is a little more sophisticated.  It doesn't AFAIK have any semantic way to mark sentences per se; it just puts a wide space (wider than one space but narrower than two; this is probably better than two full spaces) after terminal punctuation.  However, if you don't want that (for example because a period indicates an abbreviation), then you can escape it by putting a hard space ("\ " or "~"; I never got the difference between them completely straight) after the period. --Trovatore (talk) 22:10, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * "\ " gives a normal space, "~" a non-breaking space. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:50, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I always type two spaces between sentences, and I find HTML's and Wikipedia's removal of the extra space annoying, but I suppose we have to make allowances for modern style.  I find that the very narrow spaces between sentences in many modern publications slows down my reading.     D b f i r s   22:13, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I think that there are national differences. In my experience, Americans are far more likely to use double-spacing than are British people. Double-spacing to me, a 40-something Briton, seems absurdly quaint when used here. DuncanHill (talk) 00:57, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
 * It was also standard in the UK, and taught here.   D b f i r s   06:18, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Single or double-spacing was apparently a big issue in the days of mechanical typewriters with their monospaced fonts. Nowadays we mostly use proportional fonts (unless we're writing source code) and the computer can adjust the spacing any way we want. TeX, and by inheritance LaTeX too, makes the space at the end of a sentence by default 4/3 the normal interword space. This is a property of the font, so if you don't use the default font (Computer Modern 10), this factor may be different. The full details are in the TeXBook. Maybe even more important, the stretchability of these spaces is increased too, by a factor 3, the shrinkability is reduced to 1/3. Spaces after .?! are affected the same way, spaces after :;, in a similar but less extreme way. If the full stop follows a capital letter, TeX assumes it's an abbreviation and does a nice trick with a variable known as the \spacefactor to suppress the extra space. And naturally, all of this can be tweaked by the user. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:50, 5 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I learnt to touch type in the 1970s and two spaces after a full stop (UK for period, which means something quite different over here) was standard. However, by the time I moved into teaching touch-typing in the mid-1990s, one space had become standardised by the Royal Society of Arts. The excuse they gave was that, because of fully-justified margins and proportional spacing on screens, there was no need to specify two spaces in that situation. --TammyMoet (talk) 16:38, 5 August 2017 (UTC)


 * In typing class, we learned that two spaces between sentences was required, mainly because on a page where the text is flush left and letter-spacing is fixed, the double-space is needed for readability to show separation of sentences. Later when I learned typography and typesetting, the rule was different, because of the variable letter-spacing, the fineness of the typeset characters, the sharpness of the text, and the use of two spaces was absolutely prohibited in every case. And indeed when you look at a traditional typed page, especially in a standard typewriter font such as Courier, the double-spacing between sentences is attractive and helpful. And when you occasionally see a low-quality typeset page, as in some of these cheap fliers you find hanging on your doorknob or under the windshield wiper of your auto, with a poorly printed text that has professional-quality Helvetica type and double-spaces between every sentence, it is a visual horror. Double-spaces look good in a fixed-space environment, but are cheap and shoddy in a professional variable-space page. —Stephen (talk) 20:49, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
 * This does seem to be a line one hears a lot. I disagree rather sharply.
 * Proportional spacing makes it more important, not less, to have more space between sentences than between words. The reason is that, in monospace, the period at least takes up an entire space.  In a proportional font, the period just sidles up against the word before it, and can easily get lost to the eye.
 * Spacing should do some of the work of lexical chunking for you, so that you can grasp at a glance where sentence boundaries are in a paragraph, before you've actually read it. That way you know approximately how long sentences are before you start reading them, which helps avoid garden-path-type problems in understanding. --Trovatore (talk) 23:33, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Sentence-ending periods do not get lost in my eye. A period takes up an entire space only if the font has fixed spacing. In a variable-space font, the period takes up a space that is only a hair wider than itself, and, since the period is so short (from top to bottom), all the space above it is left empty, and that extra empty space is added to the following word space, making the space between sentences appear wider in a variable-space font. Consider, for example, the space between these two sentence fragments: “than between words. The reason is that”... Don't you think that it is plenty wide? If you could examine a full page of variable-width type produced unprofessionally with double spaces between sentences, I think you would realize how crude it looks. Just putting a one-line example here would not do justice to the way a whole page of it looks.
 * In any case, typography was an honorable and learned profession for centuries before the modern personal printer almost ended the need for these artists. Spacing and every other aspect of type that you can think of, and many that you would not think of, have been considered and discussed at length by dedicated masters of the art for centuries, and these rules and practices are not the mindless, rash, slapdash pronouncements of disinterested key-pokers. Under the rubric of spacing, there are many considerations that you've probably never thought of. For example, rivers, orphans, the control of the severity of ragged right. I'm certain that nothing I say will have any effect on your opinion, but I just want to point out that the problem has been considered by better men than us for a very long time. —Stephen (talk) 08:24, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
 * This thread is slipping into a debate over personal opinions, which this board is not for. Unless anybody has references to academic studies objectively investigating the effects of sentence-spacing typographic variation on readers, I'd suggest we discontinue it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:24, 6 August 2017 (UTC)


 * There is a whole site dedicated to this (and other typograpic trivia).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:43, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Lovely site (I particularly like the adjustable sentence spacing widget in the sidebar). Unless it's too late at night for me, it does seem to confirm that larger spaces have historically been preferred, even in variable space fonts. HenryFlower 22:09, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, thank you for that excellent reference. ( I was beginning to think that my memory had totally failed. )    D b f i r s   15:08, 7 August 2017 (UTC)