Hello, Russ Allbery [07/Feb 5:23pm -08] wrote: > This is mostly for Sean, but no reason not to send it to the list. > > About a year ago, I personally stopped using two spaces after periods in > writing. I was taught that way and always used that formatting in email > and on Usenet, but that style of formatting is fairly obsolete these days > and for various personal reasons I wanted to adopt the new formatting. > > Policy currently largely, but not entirely, uses two spaces after periods. > When working on Policy, should I: > > 1. Use one space after a period in new text, let my editor reformat > rewrapped paragraphs to use one space after a period, and not worry > about the inconsistency. I think this is what's largely happening now. > > 2. Configure my editor to use two spaces after periods when editing Policy > and try to consistently maintain that style. > > 3. (A bigger change.) Start adopting XKCD 1285 formatting for Policy in > new text: each sentence on its own logical line (thus often longer than > 80 columns), with a newline at the end of each sentence. > > Because the input is reStructuredText, I don't believe the whitespace > after periods makes a difference in the output. The only place I'm unsure > is with the PDF and texinfo output, since the spacing is preserved in the > input to TeX, but some spot checking seems to indicate that TeX makes its > own decisions and ignores the spacing. > > At work, we use 3, and in general I prefer it, but it's a big change and > would mean lines in email messages for review would break the normal email > formatting conventions. It's quite nice in software forges and avoids the > problems with reflowing paragraphs causing spurious meaningless deltas in > Git, but as long as we're using email review, it might be a bridge too > far?
I strongly dislike (3) because I find it to be a distraction from producing good prose; I don't think sentence-by-sentence like that. I also find that the way Emacs's VC mode displays diffs (called diff "refinement" but I don't really understand why it's called that) means that there aren't any issues with reviewing diffs, so it seems like just working around a limitation of certain web based diff views? I think that it is okay for the text of Policy to end up with a mix of sentences ending with one space and two spaces depending on who the original author of that particular segment was. I would prefer if we allowed mass reformatting to use two spaces (e.g. before doing a bunch of edits) but disallowed mass reformatting to use one space, based on the idea that the majority of the text is currently two spaces, but maybe this is too much my own personal preference, so perhaps we should allow mass reformatting like that in both directions of sections one is about to edit? -- Sean Whitton
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