Setting to prevent Firefox from converting double spaces to single spaces?
Hello, I recently learned that browsers will condense spaces written in HTML down a single space. As someone who thinks putting two spaces after a period is more legible, I was wondering if there is a way to disable this, either in settings or with a browser extension. I know this will result in a less consistent browsing experience because not everyone types this way, however it will make my browsing experience better when reading things written by people who also believe in using two spaces. Thank you.
All Replies (3)
Whitespace handling is part of the platform specification and defines how also every other element is collapsed, how images align etc. and this has direct impact on it. (The in–prose content is not that impactful, but there's majority of whitespace used in the actual functional markup and that would break beyond recognition if you suddenly wanted to treat each of that as an additional text node.)
What you're actually looking for, is a typographic feature; that's already present and available. Here I'm using a non–breaking space to actually force the amount of spaces just in prose via the character used:
If so inclined. You could. Platform dependent, perhaps. Use as many spaces as you wish.
Some platforms might clean that up for you, but that's the platform's choice. As a rendering engine is concerned, as you can see here, that's completely fine to use. On a Mac it can be typed as Option+Space, on Windows it IIRC was Alt+0160, more info is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space how to input/use it or perhaps look for more similar alternatives that would yield the same results. (For me, personally, this alternative is the easiest to apply in day–to–day use.)
Unfortunately, while this will be fine for my own typing, I was hoping for a way to make other people's typing display correctly. Thank you for this information, even if it is not as easy or universal as I was hoping it would be.
You might try looking for some addons that do wholesale replacements of things on pages, and set it to turn any "dot–space–space" in the text nodes to "dot–nbsp–nbsp" but this can mean a non–trivial performance penalty and potential repaints with a whole can of worms of its own in terms of bugs, freezes and generally broken things that did not expect this.
Don't have any experience with a good addon to recommend, but others might. Was thinking along the lines of: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/word-replacer-max/
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