Re: Spacing

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wed, January 17, 1996 at 14:00:41 (+0100), Peter Preus wrote: ]
> Subject: Spacing
>
> In Latex you get usually additional space after the end of a sentence.
> This can be very ugly in a German document where you often have
> abbreviated words within a sentence (Dr.  d.h.  i.allg.  usw.  etc.)
> after which Latex is allowed to put that additional end of sentence
> space. In order avoid that spacing you may insert \ after the dot in
> the middle of the sentence (Dr.\), which is not done in most cases,
> because people do not know that feature or do not see that extra space,
> which is not mandatory but only optional to get a nice appearance.

I don't see how the same problems don't happen for any document in any
language if the typeset output includes more space between sentences
when the troff algorithm or something similar isn't used to identify the
true end of a sentence in the input.  I don't use LaTeX, but I would
expect this same problem to occur for English documents too.

I certainly don't like the thought of using "\ " to indicate a normal
inter-word gap vs. an end-of-sentence gap either.  I'd say it is far
more pleasing to view, and easier to learn, to edit input text using two
space characters between sentences.

And of course for those who refuse to use the two spaces or newline
between sentences, and who don't care either way about extra wide space
between sentences in the typeset output, it won't matter if this
algorithm is implemented or not.

BTW, w.r.t. changing the algorithm in Lout, it might also help to ignore
whitespace before a newline as a first step.

I think the French took the easy way out and sacrificed readability!  ;-)

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734                 VE3TCP                  robohack!woods
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