Editing 2109: Invisible Formatting

{{comic
| number    = 2109
| date      = February 8, 2019
| title     = Invisible Formatting
| image     = invisible_formatting.png
| titletext = To avoid errors like this, we render all text and pipe it through OCR before processing, fixing a handful of irregular bugs by burying them beneath a smooth, uniform layer of bugs.
}}

==Explanation==
	
Most word processor programs allow the user to select sections of text, usually by clicking and dragging the cursor across the text, or by using common mouse shortcuts such as double-clicking to select a word and triple-clicking to select an entire line. The selection is usually indicated by highlighting the text's background, such as the bright blue highlight shown in the comic.

A common reason for selecting text is so that formatting can be applied to the selection (eg. ''italics'' or '''bold''' formatting). Since space characters are part of the typography, such formatting gets applied to them too; however, as the character has no visible glyph, the formatting has no visible effect (a bold space looks exactly the same as an unformatted space). However, the formatting is ''still there'' in the document's underlying markup - it just can't be seen.

This leads to a possibility that a user may accidentally introduce invisible formatting into a document without noticing. Such formatting has no effect on how the end user will read the document, but it could theoretically cause problems for programs that later come along to parse the document, if those programs have not been told to expect formatting. [[Randall]] worries about this invisible threat.

In the comic, Randall accidentally introduces the invisible formatting by selecting one more character than he needed to ("n", "o", "t", and an extra space character), applying bold formatting to those four characters, changing his mind, reselecting only the three characters "n", "o", "t", and removing the bold formatting. Because he failed to notice that a space character had been selected when applying the bold, he failed to remove the bold formatting from the space. As a result, the document now contains an invisible bold space that will likely go unchecked, as nobody can see it to fix it.

There are a couple of ways Randall could have avoided this problem. In many word processors, double-clicking a word will select all characters in the word and nothing else; this is an easier action than trying to drag the cursor, which can be fiddly and inaccurate. This would have prevented Randall from accidentally selecting the space character; although could create the problem if multiple words (and the space(s) between) were initially enboldened but then constituent word-groupings were unenboldened, leaving the whitespace between unreverted. Alternatively, if the program had an "undo" feature, Randall could simply have undone the bold formatting instead of removing the formatting manually. This would have undone the bold formatting on the space character, fixing the problem (and saving time, too), but only presuming that other changes had not occured in the interim which weren't more important/time-saving to keep.

Though Randall is likely thinking of computer-related problems caused by his invisible formatting, there is also another possible problem: it leaves trace evidence of Randall's formatting attempt. For example, if an editor later comes along and notices the bold space, they may figure out that Randall originally bolded the word "not" before changing his mind. Depending on the context, a bolded "not" could be enough to change the tone of the text from polite and formal to dismissive (eg. "We believe you are not suitable for this position." vs "We believe you are '''not''' suitable for this position.")

In the title text, Randall says that he fixes such invisible formatting errors by running the text through {{w|Optical character recognition|OCR}}, which turns images into text. Since OCR uses optical recognition, it would not be able to detect the invisible formatting and would therefore not reproduce it. Although this would "fix" the invisible formatting issue, it would likely introduce a bigger problem: OCR is not 100% reliable at recognizing characters or formatting, and often produces inaccurate results. However, Randall facetiously suggests that this is a preferable state of affairs, as OCR at least produces errors at a reasonably consistent rate, which Randall feels is better than irregular invisible formatting errors.

As the title text explains, Randall finds it very important to control all information he publishes. Real-world examples are governments changing the impact of reports for political reasons. Attempted tampering of this kind can be revealed by bold spaces. Another example would be a casual and short one-sentence reply e.g. to a romantic interest, which one takes one hour to formulate to sound as natural as possible.

There are also other occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem for later editors (see the [[#Trivia|Trivia]] section below). Randall’s background in {{w|computer programming}} could also make him more attentive to these types of technical problems, and therefore add this as a reason for his worries about invisible formatting.

==Transcript==

:[A text editor, with some options. They are superscript in one section, bold, italic and underscore in another section and alignments in the third section. The word "not ", including the following space, is highlighted in blue. There is a cursor below it.]
:Text: ...ere, but would <span style="background:#64D5FF">not </span>have to mo...
:Action: Select

:[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is bolded.]
:Text: ...ere, but would <span style="background:#64D5FF">'''not '''</span>have to mo...
:Action: Click

:[The cursor is next to the "to". No text is highlighted.]
:Thought bubble: ...Nah, the bold is too much.
:Text: ...ere, but would '''not '''have to mo...

:[The word "not" is now highlighted in blue again, but the following space is not.]
:Text: ...ere, but would <span style="background:#64D5FF">'''not</span> '''have to mo...
:Action: Select

:[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is not bolded.]
:Text: ...ere, but would <span style="background:#64D5FF">not</span>''' '''have to mo...
:Action: Click

:[The cursor and the blue highlighting are gone. The space after "not" has a dashed box around it, and an arrow points to it.]
:Text: ...ere, but would not''' '''have to mo...
:Arrow: Hidden bold space

:[Caption below the panels:]
:When editing text, in the back of my mind I always worry that I'm adding invisible formatting that will somehow cause a problem in the distant future.

==Trivia==
There are also other occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem for later editors etc. These include:
*Editing that adds some text at the location of the space will make this text bold.
*Exporting to plain text files.  If for example a {{w|markdown}} style is used, there will be characters in the output that do not make sense.
*Scraping, data mining, and linguistics processing by computer algorithms.  Often (although not always) these algorithms are written based on samples of training or testing text that may not have spurious formatting present, and may misprocess something when encountering the spurious formatting.
*Wikis. In''' '''this''' '''sentence,''' '''every''' '''space''' '''is''' '''a''' '''hidden''' '''bold''' '''space. From the editing view, all the spaces look <code><nowiki>like''' '''this</nowiki></code>. This will annoy all future editors of this article, due to the hidden apostrophes which are formatting the spaces. They may also accidentally introduce bold words.
**By default, MediaWiki attempts to prevent this by not including the trailing spaces in the bold formatting when you click the “bold” button, so someone has to manually type the formatting apostrophes to do this.
*A situation where formatted text is not allowed, and is rejected, but the user failed to strip formatting from the spaces, and this is noticed.
*If a font has the word space look different between the bold and the regular, perhaps to make it so bold words are spaced closer to each other, the spacing will look inconsistent if there is a hidden bold space.
*Unnecessary extra formatting will usually unnecessarily increase file size, which may put the document above some maximum file size threshold.
*Bold (or italic or non-breaking) spaces are also popular in {{w|Steganography|steganography}}. By using bold spaces in some places and not in others it is possible to hide secret information in a public text, that will not be visible to the casual reader, who does not explicitly search for the hidden information. Additionally if such a document is found with a person, that person can {{w|Plausible_deniability|plausibly deny}} all knowledge of the encoded information.

Popular modern word processing programs have features which may make it easier to notice improperly formatted invisible characters. In the tutorials linked here, one may learn how to view invisible characters in [https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/show-or-hide-tab-marks-in-word-84a53213-5d02-404a-b022-09cae1a3958b Microsoft Word], [https://support.apple.com/kb/PH23650?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US Pages] and [https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/01/03100000.html LibreOffice Writer], however even with this on it would be difficult to spot a bolded space (which looks like a bolded dot &ndash; now visible but so small it's still hard to tell if it's bold or not). In the older word processor {{w|WordPerfect}}, one could do this with the “Reveal Codes” feature, which showed you character codes, separate from the characters themselves, around the characters.  For example, a bolded space would look something like "<span style="background:#34F5FF">[BOLD&#8827;</span>&ensp;<span style="background:#34F5FF">&#8826;BOLD]</span>".

Web sites which allow content to be edited by users but generate the formatting code automatically often have versions of the invisible formatting problem; for example, eBay listings which use anything other than the default font rapidly accumulate hard spaces, font end and begin transitions, and other invisible formatting if they are subsequently edited, which can slow page loading and cause other problems. This is also seen in blogs etc.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]