"PG" == Paul Graydon <[email protected]> PG> On a slight tangent to this, I was surprised to read the PG> other week about the extremes of passion between various PG> parties over the use of double spaces after periods. I PG> use it instinctively as that was how I was always taught PG> to type. Full Stop, double space, captialise the first PG> letter and away you go.
From a typographical perspective, you should never have two spaces after a period -- using them is a carry over from the days of monospaced typewriter fonts. Of course if you use TeX and Emacs, as I do, TeX takes care of the spacing (by happily compressing extra whitespace), and Emacs uses the doubled spaces to easily locate the ends of sentences, allowing you to zap to the start or end of a sentence (as well as kill to the end of a sentence). There are times that having that ability is hugely useful.* I still do double spaces in e-mail, too, because I expect it to be viewed as monospaced text (as I write it!). I would expect that most viewers that use other fonts (and reflow text) these days are smart enough to handle that extra space. (HTML also collapses spaces, unless your word-processor ``cleverly'' makes them unbreakable spaces.) Luckily, as ``kids today'' (we're told) eschew e-mail in favor of social-media updates, we fogies can keep our old habits, at least until all the old systems are shut down forever. Claire * Feel free to imagine a rant here about another pernicious modernism -- the unbroken paragraph of text that goes on and on for line after line, making diffs next to impossible. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Claire M. Connelly [email protected] System Administrator, Dept. of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
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