Am Dienstag, 3. April 2018, 11:02:32 CEST schrieb Neil Bothwick:
> On Tue, 03 Apr 2018 09:28:40 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > > > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces,
> > > > not one. Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > > > I only put one after a comma tho.
> > >
> > > That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow
> > > too.
> >
> > Correct? In what sense? I've only encountered the practice in American
> > writers (and now Canadian?), so it seems to be a regional preference.
>
> It was done in the UK too. It dates back to the days of typewriters with
> monospaced text, to make sentence breaks clearer. It's an anachronism
> nowadays, but a habit that is hard to break if you were brought up that
> way.
There's also support for it in text editors, e.g., Vim has an option (append
'J' to cpoptions) that makes it treat only punctuation followed by two spaces
as a sentence delimiter, so that using '(' and ')' to move between sentences
skips abbreviations, which I find very practical (and which is basically why I
started following this convention in the first place). Emacs behaves this way
by default, but you can override it by setting 'sentence-end-double-space' to
nil, according to the Emacs manual.
HTH
--
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup
