Re: End-of-sentence spacing

[Peter Schaffter]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2020, John Gardner wrote:
> I condemn two spaces, period.

Having gotten bitten by the who-says-what-where bug concerning
double-spaced sentences, I re-read my own documentation for the .SS
macro in mom.  Seems to me I covered all the bases:

 "Typeset copy should never have two spaces between sentences, and
  the "zero" argument [to .SS] tells groff to give the extra spaces
  no space at all (effectively removing them).  Therefore, if you
  double-space your sentences (as you should when writing in a text
  editor), get in the habit of putting

    .SS 0

  at the top of your files.

  If you do use SS for something other than ensuring that you don’t
  get unwanted sentence spaces in output copy, you can set or reset
  the sentence space to the groff default (the same width as a word
  space, ie double-spaced input sentences will appear double-spaced on
  output as well) with

    .SS DEFAULT

  If you’re using the document processing macros and your PRINTSTYLE
  is TYPEWRITE, .SS DEFAULT is the default, because you do want
  double spaces between sentences in copy that imitates the look of a
  typewritten document."


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