Old Ways Die Hard
I was pawing through some old material, a typical Mercury Retrograde project, and just cleaning up the old formatting.
The first pass was to remove the original, strict “HTML” format, with font, paragraph and carriage returns buried in each paragraph.
The machine I was working on, an older laptop, the easiest way I could do this, find the offending line ending, double-tap the trackpad that would select the carriage return at the line end, and then I would tap the space bar. The line ending was replaced by a space, and the word-processor instinctual action would add a second space. Double-tap the double-space, and hit the space bar again, replacing the double-space with the appropriate single space.
Simple enough. But, as a Mercury Retrograde inspired-action, looking back, I kept finding the original keyboard actions, and this is material that never made it to the copy editor.
What that means, the older stuff like that? Embedded in that material, some of this is only about 25 years old, but some of that text? There’s still a double-space at the end of the sentence. Old-school. OG–style. Using a keyboard, while I was taught on a typewriter, I didn’t develop skills until later schooling, but what I learned? Two spaces from the space bar after each sentence-ending period.
On separate occasions, I’ve done global search and replace to help fix some of the formatting issues. Be nice if there was a clean, standard approach through the entire body of work.
Old Ways Die Hard
The old keyboard trick, my outdated habit of a double-space after a period? I’ve had to unlearn that. However, it still shows up, especially in the older copies left hanging about.
It’s a quirk, a habit, an enforced skill that I learned then had to unlearn, as the march of the time makes for better services.
With the resurgence in manual typewriters as toys? I have to wonder if this is a skill that needs to be taught — again?
Old Ways Die Hard
the Portable Mercury Retrograde
