5 ms·
One of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do: > I think most books don't do this any more [have wider spaces betwe
by svat 7y ago
One of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do:
> I think most books don't do this any more [have wider spaces between sentences]. Newspapers certainly don't. It's way too much trouble escaping out all the abbreviations.
If you need wider spaces between sentences you also don't want them indiscriminately after every period, so you need to exercise more care and indicate them differently in the input markup. For example, using two spaces:
This is a sentence. This is another. Dr. Smith wrote in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. about NASA. It was good.
Or in TeX, which makes the typical case easier by using the heuristic that a period after a lowercase letter ends a sentence, you need to indicate wherever this heuristic fails (you can also use ~ to prevent a line-break):
This is a sentence. This is another. Dr.~Smith wrote in Proc.\ Amer.\ Math.\ Soc. about NASA\null. It was good.
Having to keep track of which periods are ends of sentences is a bit inconvenient in the general case, which explains why wider inter-sentence spacing was given up first in newspapers, then low-quality mass-publishing, then finally high-quality printing as well (almost). But typographers today (see my other comment) make it seem like this has always been the case and wider spaces was just a quirk from typewriters somehow!
- mcguire 7y agoNote: You should use nonbreaking spaces (the ~) in many places where they are often not used.
- JadeNB 7y agoWhen?
- pxx 7y agoWait, what's the \null for and shouldn't there be a \ after Soc.?
- svat 7y agoYes there should be a \ after “Soc.” Proofreading the typeset output might have caught this error. :-) The “\null” after “NASA” is to show an example where the heuristic fails in the other direction: the “.” after the uppercase letter won't be considered to end the sentence, so you need to either type `\hbox{NASA}.` or `NASA\null.` (where `\null` is an abbreviation for `\hbox{}` i.e. an empty box) or something like that — something so that the period doesn't immediately follow an uppercase letter.
- JadeNB 7y agoI think `\relax` is a better no-op than `\null`, right?
- svat 7y agoWhile \relax is indeed a no-op “command”, that is precisely why it doesn't affect anything here. The way TeX works is that (roughly speaking), after expanding macros and acting on other commands (primitives) it encounters, it treats every character it encounters as another member of the current horizontal list (paragraph). Then it breaks this list into lines, etc. Whether you insert \relax or not, the horizontal list is the same: the uppercase A will be followed by the period. So you need something like \hbox{} or (equivalently) \null (something that actually gets into the horizontal list) between the “A” and the “.”.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]