[Doc-SIG] Idea: make double-space between sentences meaningful
David Goodger
goodger at python.org
Mon May 24 17:10:49 EDT 2004
[Forwarding to the list with permission]
>> From: Beni Cherniavsky [mailto:cben at users.sf.net]
>>
>> Some formats (notably LaTeX) support the typographical
>> convention (of some languages, e.g. English but not French
>> IIRC) of putting a bigger space after the end of a sentence
>> than between words. LaTeX tries to guess intellegently but
>> can fail. Its guessing can be explicitly overriden.
>>
>> Currently, reST provides no way to convey this information to
>> the output format. Producing high-quality output requires
>> this information. There already exists an obvious convention
>> supported by programs (e.g. Emacs)
>> for representing it in plain text: just use a double space
>> after the end of a sentence. I propose to make this official
>> for reStructuredText: more than one space between words after
>> punctuation signifies a sentence end.
>>
>> Backward compatiblity: at worse, it will force all sentence
>> ends to single spaces in existing documents that don't use
>> the double-space convention in the reST source. It's a good
>> bet that anybody who cares about it in his LaTeX output also
>> cares about his source, but it's a good idea to make this a
>> parser option (defaulting off?)...
The one-space-vs-two-spaces-after-a-sentence debate can be as
religious as any other (as demonstrated by a recent,
embarrassingly-long thread on TECHWR-L). I personally am in the camp
that says that two spaces is OK in monospaced text, but unnecessary
and ugly in a proportional typeface. Thus, I would want two
(end-of-sentence) spaces in source text to result in one space in
proportionally-laid-out output.
It's fine for the parser to convey this information to the writer,
which can then choose whether to use it or ignore it. I would want to
configure most writers to ignore it.
-------------------------
Janet Swisher
Senior Technical Writer
Enthought, Inc.
1-512-536-1057
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