On 16/06/2005, at 8:24 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
They are taught in English schools and regarded as pretty
usual. At least, schools who still teach typing. Even fmt puts
two spaces by default. Publishers often want "uniform spacing,"
but then you get some like Elsevier (big journals publisher)
that have the opposite in their submission guidelines:
http://authors.elsevier.com/GuideForAuthors.html?PubID=622785&dc=GFA
The same habit usually happens after ! and ? too.
It's usual and taught, and so valid in English. That's why
you'll find some people who were taught typing using them.
(I don't, but mostly because I used computers to write for
publication and groff, latex, xhtml and all don't care much.)
I appreciate the need to simplify matters, but avoid misleading
people with exaggeration, as it causes confusion later.
Sorry for the confusion: I should have been more specific. I was
talking about teaching the language itself, not typing. I agree that
these old-style printing formats are losing relevance, which is a
fairly effective way to decide: survival of the current and most
adaptable. ;)
Speaking of groff, are you involved at all in its i18n future? I'm
trying to test out packaging utf-8 manpages, and I don't know how
realistic its roadmap for utf-8 function is. Roll on the day when
Unicode support is, uh, fully supported.
<back to my current encoding struggle>
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
Clytie Siddall--Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia
Ở thành phố Renmark, tại miền sông của Nam Úc
