As I understand it: In the Old Days (when there were typesetting SYSTEMS) an inputted period, then space would be recognized as an "End Of Sentence Character." That space after the period would be treated differently than an ordinary word space. In the middle of a paragraph, it might perhaps be a bit wider than a "normal" word space. There is no reason whatever that current "Desktop Publishing Tools" (like Quark or InDesign) couldn't include such rules, but as far as I can tell they don't. Until they DO, saying that "one" word space after a full stop is good enough is not going to satisfy me!
Personally, I find a single space after a period to be too indistinct a break, but two spaces seem a bit too much.
Different Countries/Cultures seem to have different preferences too. (I live in the U.S) ... reading a book not just "printed" but TYPESET in the U.K. drives my crazy.They seem not use almost no space between sentence.Is that hard to read, or what?
eo
On Nov 6, 2006, at 5:39 AM, Brett Terpstra wrote:
2 spaces after a period is a relic left over from the days of typewriters. Modern screen fonts no longer require the second space and, although high school typing classes teach it, it goes against typographic principles.
On Nov 6, 2006, at 7:29 AM, Max Noel wrote:
On 11/6/06, Hans-Joerg Bibiko bibiko@eva.mpg.de wrote:
IIRC Emacs considers that a sentence ends with a period
followed with
either 2 spaces, a linefeed or a formfeed character.
The tricky thing is e.g. that if you write German usually you don't type two spaces after a period to indicate that is the end of a sentence. So, by my opinion, it is very difficult to define what is a 'sentence'.
Indeed. Actually, I don't think you actually do that in any language except Emacs (and perhaps LaTeX).
-- Max