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Not so for the default mode in LaTeX. It tries to guess which periods indicate end-of-sentence (based on whether the next letter is capitalized) and will add a
by gorgoiler 7y ago
Not so for the default mode in LaTeX.
It tries to guess which periods indicate end-of-sentence (based on whether the next letter is capitalized) and will add additional horizontal space accordingly, unless you tell it not to by declaring your document uses “French Spacing”.
(Edit: and my memory may be serving me incorrectly here, but I recall 20 years ago having a support package that also detected double-space in the source as another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard extension.)
- copperx 7y agoI remember reading the TeXbook and learning that the space after a period is wider if there's a capital afterwards and the various ways of suppressing this behavior. So it's a TeX thing, not LaTeX.
- gorgoiler 7y agoThanks. I appreciate the attention to detail! FWIW, the distinction between the two is blurry given that most people I’ve known in academia never use TeX directly other then through LaTeX.
- gowld 7y agoTo be clear, it’s both. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2024338/latex-sometimes-puts-too-much-or-too-little-space-after-periods https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2024338/latex-sometimes-... LaTeX is based on TeX
- wodenokoto 7y agoWon’t that mess up titles like Dr. Livingstone and Mr. President? Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.
- gorgoiler 7y agoYup: Prof.\@ Crumb ...is the behavior suppressor.
- zonefuenf 7y agoI usually force a narrow space after titles: Dr.\,Livingstone
- yellowapple 7y ago> Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard. It would be a lot less hard if we were able to unambiguously tell the computer whether a period ends a sentence. I wonder how we could possibly do that... (Less sarcastically: a lot of Unix programs - Emacs, vim, troff, etc. - solve this problem by defaulting to double-spaced sentences, thus resolving the ambiguity. Kinda odd that this ain't the Tex approach; there's already precedent by using doubled-up ``backquotes'' and ``single quotes'' to produce “smart double quotes”, and lone `backquotes' and `single quotes' similarly become ‘smart single quotes’.)