Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 17:11:10 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Nadav Eiron <nadav@cs.Technion.AC.IL> Cc: Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org>, Joe Walsh <crli@crli.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Punctuation conventions (was: cvs commit: src/games/fortune/datfiles fortunes) Message-ID: <20000605171109.A15553@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95-heb-2.07.1000605141417.29121A-100000@csd>; from nadav@cs.Technion.AC.IL on Mon, Jun 05, 2000 at 02:16:07PM %2B0300 References: <20000605121257.A95658@mithrandr.moria.org> <Pine.GSO.3.95-heb-2.07.1000605141417.29121A-100000@csd>
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Nadav Eiron said on Jun 5, 2000 at 14:16:07: > > > On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote: > > > On Thu 2000-06-01 (13:15), Joe Walsh wrote: > > > When I was doing freelance writing, my editor required that all > > > electronic manuscripts be submitted with 1 space following each > > > sentence, rather than 2. I believe the typographical layout software > > > (such as Quark) then figures out how much actual space to put after > > > the punctuation based on the needs of the line as it will be printed. > > > > How does it know whether it's the end of a sentence or an end of an > > abbreviation? > > > > "I don't know Jordan K. Hubbard is the only one you've reported." > > > > "I don't know Jordan K. Hubbard is the only one you've reported." > > LaTeX, for example, assumes a period followed by any amount of whitespace > and an upper-case letter is an end of a sentence. Thus, your sentence > above would have to be written as: > "I don't know Jordan K.\ Hubbard is the only one you've reported. > (i.e., escaping the space after the period). <pedantry> Actually, no. What it assumes is that a period after a lowercase letter is the end of a sentence, and a period after an uppercase letter is not. So the escaping above will do nothing, and if K. is not the end of the sentence, nothing is required to be done. But if K is the end of the sentence, you have to tell it that explicitly, with (iirc) a \@ before the full stop. (Can't remember because that's never happened to me...) On the other hand, when the period after a lowercase letter is not the end of the sentence (eg Mr. Jordan Hubbard), you do have to tell it explicitly as in Mr.\ Jordan Hubbard). </pedantry> I'd be astonished if Quark can get it right purely by whether it's one or two spaces, and even more astonished if the users get it right at their end. This kind of thing would require a lot of editorial intervention. R. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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