Re: End-of-sentence spacing

[Dorai Sitaram]

 I'm not completely sure it's true for all modern applications, but I hope 
you're right that it doesn't hurt in general to explicitly type two spaces 
after a sentence. As a dinosaur, that's what I used to do, but trained myself 
out of it after reading a high-profile tirade scolding me (at least it felt 
like I was being individually targeted, so I promptly wilted). I mean of course 
the famous


https://slate.com/technology/2011/01/two-spaces-after-a-period-why-you-should-never-ever-do-it.html


It was neither the only, first, last, or most vituperous critique of Two 
Spaces: There has been a rising tide of condemnation of the practice in the 
media, as shown by Googling "two spaces after period". I am yet to see any 
similarly full-throated defense of it.


But now that I know what's possible, it doesn't matter so much and I don't 
really need to re-train, or re-re-train, myself. I've been able to configure my 
text editor so it will insert the extra space if I missed it, but only for 
groff input. And, no, it's not too difficult to develop a heuristic for when to 
insert that second space. In Vim, for instance,


 %s/\([.?!][’”'")\]]*\) \</\1 \ /ge


The only problem area is the period after an abbreviation, but consistently 
entering "\ " after those rare periods takes care of it.


--d




     On Saturday, December 19, 2020, 05:23:07 PM EST, Dave Kemper 
<saint.snit@gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 On 12/19/20, Dorai Sitaram <ds26gte@yahoo.com> wrote:
> groff pretty much forces one to use two spaces after sentence-ending
> punctuation, unless it's at the end of a source line. Is there a way to
> avoid this, so that the space is uniform regardless of whether the ending
> punctuation occurs mid- or end-line?

Using 0 as the second parameter of the .ss request results in the same
space being put between words and between sentences.

> (I could resign myself to always type
> 2 spaces after every sentence, but convention has moved away from this type
> of unergonomic typing, and it's difficult to do it just for groff.)

I'd turn this around, and ask what other applications misbehave if you
type two spaces between sentences?  I type that way across the board
with no noticeable down side.  Developing the habit of typing
everything with two spaces between sentences aids the writing process,
because it's easy to do searches to find sentence boundaries (and some
text editors have keystrokes that recognizes such sentence boundaries
automatically).

If your final copy requires that sentences be separated by only one
space, it's easy to squeeze out the extra space with a simple search
and replace (whereas the opposite is impossible to do with an
algorithm, because so many different punctuation combinations can end
sentences, and algorithms can't always distinguish between a period
ending a sentence and a period indicating an abbreviation).

But you'll probably find that leaving the extra spaces in doesn't
cause any problems, no matter what the application is.  Anything
displayed in HTML will squeeze it out anyway on display.  Other
applications will show it, but what is the down side to that?  In
informal contexts such as email and online chat tools, there almost
certainly is none.  In material that needs to be typeset to modern
convention, where sentences don't get extra space, whatever typesetter
you're using will almost certainly handle this.