Re: Extra space after punctuation marks

[Blake McBride]

At 04:41 PM 1/20/96 MET, address@hidden wrote:
>I think we're missing the point.  Yes, particularly if you look at the narrow
>columns of a newspaper or magazine, often there will be even less white space
>after punctuation marks than between words.  Yet the spacing is presumably
>made according to some deliberate algorithm designed to maximize the ease with
>which the article can be read, based presumably on heuristics aquired from
>years of experience.

Or based on the fact that they don't want to pay for extra paper or postage...


>
>Personally, as a user of the emacs editor, I always place two spaces at the end
>of sentences as emacs provides a nice series of commands for jumping forwards
>and backwards whole sentences, or for deleting a whole sentence by pressing a
>single key.  The consequence is that lout will usually include extra spacing
>after a full stop, but, on those occasions when the full stop in the source
>text appears at the end of a line, it won't.  In other words, the spacing that
>appears in an lout formatted document is not based on anybody's idea as to what
>sort of spacing makes reading easier, or even according to some sort of
>convention, but instead on the accidental placing of the full stops in the
>source text.

The key word in the above paragraph is "accidental".  I don't want the format
of my documents appearing "accidental".  I want it consistent.

And adding extra space after a stop is not "anybody's idea".  It is a standard
(albeit possibly out of date) which is still preferred by many.


>
>Frankly, I think this is a *very* minor point.  TeX would not do this, so the
>sticklers for convention might be better advised to use TeX.  I don't even
>notice the problem. Also, my guess is that "desirable" spacing is very likely
>to be dependent on the line lengths anyway, so producing it would not be easy.

It's not a minor point to me.  This is the _only_ reason I have not switched
from TeX to Lout!

I think you are missing the point.  The point is consistency and predictability.
I prefer a bit extra space after stops and want to be able to depend on my 
preference being applied on a consistent basis.


>I might add that the best solution would be for some kind soul to write a
>lout-mode for emacs, a bit like auctex for TeX, in which ".\n" is always
>replaced by "."  "\n" when a full stop occurs at the end of a line.


I don't like this answer for two reasons.  

1.  I'd hate to see ."  " all over the place in my source text, and

2.  I don't want to marry emacs and lout such that if I want to do an lout
document I must use emacs.

--blake



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Blake McBride                           Algorithms Corporation
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