Dear BR:

You wrote:
> As an writer, editor, proofreader and whathaveyou, I enjoy your site and its accessibility.
> The problems I have are with the Gatesizing of some of the punctuation. Coming from a typographical background, I dislike Microsoft’s versions of several marks. For example, Microsoft supplies an ellipsis thus…(okay, it looks okay in this typeface but in Times and many of the older typefaces it doesn’t). The original ellipsis was three fullpoints with 1&1/2 point spacing. Microsoft is three fullpoints with no spacing, which looks ugly, especially when used with a space each side.
> Microsoft only provides dashes as an “Insert Symbol’ option, which most are too lazy to bother with, preferring to use the old typist’s trick of “–“.
> I think one of the best things we can do for people who come to a grammar site is to advise them to observe what really good magazines and book publishers do. Yes, I know publishers vary, but not as much as one might
think. I don’t have any problem with variations in grammar usage as long as it makes the sense absolutely clear and looks good on the page. With those two guidelines, I find ‘standard’ grammar really comes into its own — after
all, it’s been proved for several hundred years, which is more than we can say for Microsoft.
> Cheers
> B
>
As you and I both know there is no “English Academy” that sets particular standards. Publishers and widespread users have set standards for both spelling and grammar. It looks like Microsoft may be contributing. In most word processors, including theirs, the two hyphens combine into a dash automatically unless you turn the feature off.

I find their grammar checker annoying sometimes–asking questions about things that I already know about, e.g., do I want “specially” or “especially”? It also tries to make a case that “that” and “which” should be treated differently when they introduce certain subordinate clauses. I consider that bogus, but what can you do?