Re: End-of-sentence spacing

[Peter Schaffter]

On Sat, Dec 19, 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.

A piece of advice I have been happily ignoring since sometime back
in the 90s.  Certain kinds of texts (scientific, technical) and the
ways they are to be used (e.g. one off, or formatted for multiple media
types and platforms) undeniably benefit from it.  But I simply
cannot compose a work of fiction, or an article, or a rewiew one
screen line at a time.  It is not how one reads (at least not those
of us who grew up reading ink on dead trees), and significantly
interferes with one's ability to assess the meaning and flow of the
text.

This is the the first paragraph of _Bleak House_ typed one screen
line at a time, no wrap:

London.
Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn 
Hall.
Implacable November weather.
As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face 
of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet 
long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes 
of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might 
imagine, for the death of the sun.
Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.
Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill 
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands 
of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if 
this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, 
sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at 
compound interest.

I can't even read the whole text because half of it is off-screen!

Moreover, if I turn wrapping on, the last sentence alone takes up
six lines on an 80-col terminal and would be hell to edit for those
of us who use 'k' and 'j' to navigate up and down in vi since a
single 'j' moves the cursor six lines down--generally not what you
expect.  Wrap conflates 'k' and 'j' with '('and ')'.  In other words,
'k' and 'j' effectively become sentence navigation commands instead
of screen movement commands.  This represents a significant loss of
editing functionality.

Here's the same paragraph, 72 characters per line, automatic wrap.

"London.  Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
 in Lincoln's Inn Hall.  Implacable November weather.  As much mud in
 the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of
 the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
 forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up
 Holborn Hill.  Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft
 black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown
 snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of
 the sun.  Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.  Horses, scarcely better;
 splashed to their very blinkers.  Foot passengers, jostling one
 another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing
 their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other
 foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke
 (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon
 crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement,
 and accumulating at compound interest."

I can see all the text, my head doesn't have to swivel like at
a tennis match to read from left to right, and I can grasp the
overall effectiveness of the paragraph in a few seconds.  I can,
furthermore, navigate up and down in the text in the expected manner
in addition to jumping from sentence to sentence if I wish.

Since groff imposes no requirement that each sentence be a unique
source line, I see no reason even to suggest it to (new) users as
good style, except as a useful, and perhaps at times required,
strategy for collaborative/multiplatfom/multimedia documents.

Furthermore, since groff treats end of sentence characters followed
by one space, two spaces, or newlines identically when sentence
spacing is disabled (as it is by default), the issue of whether to
enter monospaced input with one or two spaces between sentences
is moot.  Either can be used.  I prefer two because even in
proportional font typesetting, readability is improved by the space
between sentences being fractionally larger than the space between
words; two spaces is how you tell groff to use sentence spacing when
you're not doing sentence-by-line input.  Plus I'm scared that the
ghost of my highschool typing teacher is going to whack me with his
pointer for not double-spacing sentences.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
https://www.schaffter.ca