Invisible Formatting
Invisible Formatting
[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 not have to mo... Action: Select
[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not 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 not have to mo... Action: Select
[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is not bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not 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.
There are also other occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem for later editors etc. These include:
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 Microsoft Word , Pages and LibreOffice Writer , however even with this on it would be difficult to spot a bolded space (which looks like a bolded dot – now visible but so small it's still hard to tell if it's bold or not). In the older word processor 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 " [BOLD≻ ≺BOLD] ".
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.

In various word processor programs, when highlighting text, whether by clicking-and-dragging or double-clicking, it is easy to highlight characters which have no visible effects when markup is applied (ie italics or bold ), such as a space or the end-of-paragraph passage. Since in most fonts the word space looks identical between the bold, the italicized, and the regular, this has no effect on how the end user will read the document, but could theoretically cause a problem in certain occasions, most notably in computers which might parse a bold space differently or incorrectly. This problem is compounded if the text cursor does not indicate clearly the space is in bold or italics when a user hovers their mouse over it. Randall worries about this.
In the pictured case, Randall does not appear to have selected the word by double-clicking, since the cursor is depicted past the end of the word instead of on top of it; rather, he has clicked-and-dragged the mouse cursor to select it. The space character is a relatively thin character, which makes it hard to avoid and to notice, but even so most people don’t worry if they've selected it and tend not to bother fixing. Randall later uses the same click-and-drag method to have the bold removed, but this time omits the space, retaining its bold formatting on that character. Since it is a blank character, there is no easy way to tell it is still bold — even if it is slightly longer in the bold font, this may be hard to notice. This is the situation the comic is highlighting, no pun intended .
Usually, if one were to highlight a word via double-clicking, the word and the space following would both become highlighted. Therefore, this problem could have been avoided if Randall had used this method to highlight, as the space would have been automatically included both times, thus removing markup on the space character as well.
Though Randall is likely thinking of computer-related problems caused by his invisible formatting, there is also a chance that his bold space would cause other, non-computer-related issues. As Randall has bolded the word "not" but then changed his mind, it indicates that he believes writing not is too strongly-worded. With an invisible bold space, whoever the document was intended for could notice Randall's bold space and figure that the word "not" was originally bolded. 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” this by running the text through OCR , which turns physical copies or images into text. Although this would "fix" the invisible formatting (since the OCR is unable to detect it), this would usually ruin even more formatting, and add inaccuracies to the text. This way, no one can tell which bugs were introduced by him and which ones by the OCR, which he facetiously suggests is better somehow.
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 section below). Randall’s background in 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 formating.
[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 not have to mo... Action: Select
[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not 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 not have to mo... Action: Select
[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is not bolded.] Text: ...ere, but would not 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.
There are also other occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem for later editors etc. These include:
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 Microsoft Word , Pages and LibreOffice Writer , however even with this on it would be difficult to spot a bolded space (which looks like a bolded dot – now visible but so small it's still hard to tell if it's bold or not). In the older word processor 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 " [BOLD≻ ≺BOLD] ".
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.
