groff
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: warning on mid-input line sentence endings


From: Dave Kemper
Subject: Re: warning on mid-input line sentence endings
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2022 09:50:27 -0500

On 7/17/22, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> In regard to turning the warning on or off, the warning should not be
> given when sentence spacing is set to 0 (or below some small
> threshold).

Since the proposal (now filed as http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62776)
gives the user the power to turn the warning on and off at will
throughout the document, it seems presumptuous to second-guess the
user's stated preference based on other factors.

> In that case the opposite warning would be appropriate--a
> double space between sentences is questionable when sentence spacing
> is 0.

On *input*, the user should (ideally) always put two spaces between
sentences, as this enables groff to properly detect sentence divisions
and do with those whatever is requested via .ss.  (In practice, if the
additional sentence spacing will be set to 0 throughout the document
and remain that way forevermore no matter who later edits the document
in its lifetime, this doesn't matter, but the future is hard to know
with that much certainty, so letting groff detect all sentence
divisions is a good defensive-writing strategy.)

A double space between words *within* a sentence is more likely to be
a typo, and one that adversely affects the output, but that's a
different issue.



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]