Editing Punctuation (section)

===Typewriters and electronic communication===
The introduction of [[electrical telegraphy]] with a limited set of transmission codes<ref>See e.g. [[Morse code]]</ref> and [[typewriter]]s with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly.  For example, [[curved quotes]] and [[apostrophe]]s were all collapsed into two characters (' and ").  The [[hyphen]], [[minus sign]], and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into a single character (-), sometimes repeated to represent a long dash.  The [[space (punctuation)|spaces]] of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character width space, with typefaces [[monospace]]d.  In some cases a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point (!), which could otherwise be constructed by the [[overstrike]] of an apostrophe and a period; the original [[Morse code]] did not have an exclamation point.

These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with [[teleprinter]]s and the [[ASCII]] character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in [[HTML]] discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear the same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Wikipedia's software, automatically collapse double spaces to single.) The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of [[desktop publishing]] and more sophisticated [[word processor]]s. Despite the widespread adoption of character sets like [[Unicode]] that support the punctuation of traditional typesetting, writing forms like [[text messages]] tend to use the simplified ASCII style of punctuation, with the addition of new non-text characters like [[emoji]]. Informal [[text speak]] tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing.

In the computer era, punctuation characters were recycled for use in [[programming languages]] and [[URL]]s. Due to its use in [[email]] and [[Twitter]] handles, the [[at sign]] (@) has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities (10 pounds @$2.00 per pound), to a very common character in common use for both technical routing and an abbreviation for "at". The [[tilde]] (~), in moveable type only used in combination with vowels, for mechanical reasons ended up as a [[Tilde#Role of mechanical typewriters|separate key on mechanical typewriters]], and like @ it has been put to completely new uses.