Re: End-of-sentence spacing

[Wim Stockman]

Maybe you can look at the . ss request
Which sets interword spacing as first argument and the second argument as
sentence space

Kind regards
Wim Stockman

Op za 19 dec. 2020 13:36 schreef Oliver Corff <oliver.corff@email.de>:

> Hi Dorai,
>
> the point behind the end-of-source-line rule is simple, and is hidden in
> many introductory chapters of textbooks on troff and groff: You are not
> forced (and even less encouraged) to preempt any formatting in your
> input text. None of your efforts with regard to line length, intended
> line breaks etc. you try to express in self-imposed "pretty-typing" will
> spill over to the groff formatter. The formatting engine will only, I
> repeat: only obey to explicit commands. Hitting <CR> after a sentence
> period is such an explicit command and is as economical in terms of
> keystroke counts as it can be. Leave the formatting effort to groff
> (which does a better job than a human trying to mimick ascii formatting)
> and concentrate on the semantics of what you type, and you'll see that
> this is much easier than to remember and verify if all of your
> end-of-sentence full stops were followed by two spaces instead of one,
> which is actually not a good idea at all because the formatter (and
> associated macro packages) might have a different idea how an
> end-of-sentence--new-sentence distance should look like, e.g. in
> languages other than English. It might be a space only, a space and a
> half, always assuming that a space is some kind of fixed length. French
> is a good example of punctuation mark rules which look weird to
> non-French readers but which visually "make sense" in fine examples of
> French typography. German doesn't have a "two spaces is new sentence"
> concept either.
>
> troff, from the very onset of its conception, is a fine example of why
> we have division of labour, and if the designer and the user of a tool
> share this understanding, the tool can be put to better use.
>
> Please accept my apologies if I sounded rant-ish, this was not my
> intent. The question simply scratched me at a sensitive point. I once
> organized a collaborative effort to reproduce a text which featured
> around 250,000 words in eight (yes: 8) formatting variants (due to the
> number of languages represented). When planning the project, the sheer
> magnitude of these numbers made me analyze and identify potential error
> sources in the clerical work involved, and the number of keystrokes (and
> their impact on the effort to achieve a well-formed and valid source
> text) every colleague would require to finish the task was by far not a
> minor concern. In this context, using two spaces where one <CR> would
> have produced the desired result rather than with two spaces producing a
> faint lookalike which misguides the formatting engine was one of the
> no-go areas identified.
>
> Oliver.
>
>
> On 19/12/2020 11:57, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, Ulrich Lauther wrote:
> >
> >> On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 10:27:01AM +0000, Dorai Sitaram wrote:
> >>> groff pretty much forces one to use two spaces after sentence-ending
> >>> punctuation, unless it's at the end of a source line.
> >>
> >> In my opinion it is good style to start every sentence on a new
> >> source line.
> >
> > We use this as a rule and have for decades.
> >
> > Regards - Damian
> >
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>