From owner-freebsd-doc Wed Oct 6 20:58:15 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1DF7015021 for ; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 20:58:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id NAA88888; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:26:16 +0930 (CST) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:26:15 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: John Baldwin Cc: Narvi , FreeBSD Documentation Project , Neil Blakey-Milner Subject: One or two spaces after period? (was: Style Challenge!) Message-ID: <19991007132615.G78191@freebie.lemis.com> References: <199910061522.LAA00619@server.baldwin.cx> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: <199910061522.LAA00619@server.baldwin.cx> WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wednesday, 6 October 1999 at 11:22:33 -0400, John Baldwin wrote: > > On 06-Oct-99 Narvi wrote: >> >> On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> . Two spaces after '.' >>> >> No!!!! I can't see why you should even think about this. > > That's how formal English specifies sentence endings and is how the > rest of the documentation is. Well, it depends on whether it's English or American. English usage is a single space after a full stop. On the other hand, there are good reasons for two spaces: 1. It *is* a de facto standard, and de jure in America. 2. Emacs won't recognize the sequence '. ' as an end of sentence. This breaks the sentence-end macro. It also makes it wrap incorrectly in some cases. 3. It appears that vi does similar things, at least sometimes. On the other hand, nobody has put a valid reason for not doing it this way. True, some languages have different punctuation rules, but that doesn't affect the way the source looks. And it's simply not true that printed books have exactly one space after a sentence end; it varies greatly depending on how they were formatted, but in general there's more than a single space, very seldom less (and where it's less it looks terrible IMO). Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message