Re: lynx-dev Spacing cleanups and nits

[Chuck Martin]

On Fri, Dec 11, 1998 at 05:35:11AM -0500, address@hidden wrote:
> > Looks like some of us want two spaces generated by the html, and 
> > some others want only one. 
> >  
> > SUGGESTION: An OPTION, so we can choose whichever scheme makes 
> > it EASIER FOR US TO READ THE OUTPUT. 
> 
> (I expect someone to submit a patch, so we can move on to discussing
> other things - but it ought to omit the most troublesome case, a
> capitalized word ended by punctuation - that's never a complete sentence).

In light of the recent discussion, I'd like to suggest the following
three rules:

   1. If there is multiple white space after a period in the source,
      assume the author intended this to be an end of sentence and
      collapse to two spaces.

   2. If the period is immediately preceded by a word beginning with
      a lowercase letter, but followed by whitespace and then an uppercase
      letter, place two spaces after the period.

   3. All periods not meeting the first two criteria should have any
      succeeding whitespace collapsed to a single space.

The only places I can think of where this would break would be single
word sentences, which would just revert back to the present form with
a single space, or authors with really weird capitalization habits.
It's not perfect, but I think it would be better than the current
situation, and would be correct most of the time.

I think it's really rather unfortunate that the same character was
chosen to represent both the end of a  sentence and the abbreviated
form of a word or phrase.

Chuck