SBA: Reassigned to Bettina from the User Experience team for consideration.

I think you can do it manually. 
find "  "
with " "

can we close this ? 

utm099: Your suggestion does not address the problem.

The problem is that you can either replace double spaces everywhere or
nowhere.  The correct behavior should be to replace double spaces
everywhere except after an appropriate punctuation mark.  And to
ensure that spaces after appropriate punctuation be double.

"appropriate punctuation" being a colon or period.

To reproduce, go to tools|autocorrect|options and click on the "ignore
double space" box.  Then type a paragraph.  Openoffice 1.1rc4 will not
allow you to put a double space after your periods.  That's just wrong.

At least in german typography there is no double space after
punctuation marks. So this is not "wrong" per se - it depends.

I understand you want to suppress double spaces in regular Text, but
want to have double spaces allowed after puncuation marks.

Instead of using two standard spaces, you can also use a "big" space.
(unicode 2000 or similar) you may record a macro to insert this big
space or you can use autocorrect to replace e.g. ",," by
",<bigspace>". Unfortunately you have to remove a space before the
punctuation mark because autocorrect only works when <space>,,<space>
is entered, so you may only run search and replace after you are
finished and replace ",<space>" by ",<bigspace>" - without the
autocorrection...)

Anyway - confirming.
original summary: "autocorrect/double space"

Yes, there seems action to be required. Does the double space concern
further punctuation marks or just the period and the colon?

In American English, a double space should follow:

1) A colon
2) A period
3) An exclamation point
4) A question mark
5) A terminating single or double quote if the last character inside
the quotation is one of 2-5

Semicolons require only a single space.

Having a double-space after a punctuation mark is considered a carryover from
the days of manual typewriters. Modern word processors, with their proportional
spaced fonts, make this unnecessary. There are many people who have learned the
double-space rule while taking typing classes years ago, but many modern
professional style guides recommend just using the single space.

In Swedish, double space is just ridiculous. So is space before "!" and "?", 
which can be seen sometimes...

So obviously there need to be a checkbox or something for this to make everyone 
happy, I guess.

hi gvfarns
What do you think of the comment of hitch42 :
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=12387#desc8 ?
If the phenomene is slowly doning, I would suggest to close this issue.

Regards,
Cor

I think it makes sense that eventually people will stop using double space after
these punctuation marks, but until that change is universally (and I do mean
universally) accepted I think there needs to be an option that flips from one
style to the other.  I know there are teachers in high school and college that
would mark down their students' papers for having only one space after a period.

It would be great if we all used the metric system as well, but we don't.  The
right way to deal with this kind of situation is to allow for both styles. 
After all, openoffice.org does not require its users to use a4 paper instead of
"letter," right?  Similarly, regardless of how much sense it makes, it shouldn't
autocorrect users' intended spacing style without giving them the option of
using their preferred style.

@ gvfarns,
thanks for your additional comment. No need for me to disagree, but I have no
influence on the (limited) development resources.
Maybe you could write to dev@sw.openoffic.org and ask their opinion on this issue?
Cor

To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on
my owner to the owner "requirements".