John Weiss writes
> On Thu, Feb 04, 1999 at 10:14:50AM -0500, Rich Fields at 407.356.5842 wrote:
> > Examples of other spacing problems include the sentence-ending period
> > (even if also followed by close paren or right quote) that follows a
> > capital letter. For the true typesetting perfectionist there are a
> > number of spacing modifications required for other characters beside
> > period. These include question mark, exclamation point, and colon. I
> > haven't tried to see how many of them LyX follows or allows.
>
> With !?: there is no ambiguity. They never indicate anything other
> than the end of a sentence or clause. A period, however, has mutliple
> meanings depending on where it is used. Knuth et. al. decided on one,
> very simple way of deciding when one had which usage. What I proposed
> was a slightly more complex algorithm to fine-tune this ambiguity
> resolution further.
There is the ambiguity of the spacing for these three sentence-ending
characters following a capital letter. LaTeX assumes that these will
not occur at the end of a sentence and so follows them with inter-word
spacing properties rather than end-of-sentence spacing. If this is
not the case, you must specifically escape them with \@ if you want
the "correct" spacing. This was my only point. Example:
I take exception to your point in item IV! Only an idiot would...
The above will receive from LaTeX an interword spacing after
the !, instead of a sentence-ending spacing.
I was not really addressing your proposal, which I have
not followed in detail - I was simply trying to answer a question
that Larry had.
> To repeat yet again: LyX would NOT FORCE ONE KIND OF '.' OR ' ' FOR
> ALL CASES, FOR ALL TIME. It will only resolve an *ambiguous* '.' to an
> unambiguous ".\ " or "@." Any existing ".~" or ".\ " or "@." isn't
> touched, nor is a plain "." when LaTeX will interpret it correctly.
> Furthermore, LaTeX will do nothing whatsoever and ignore all
> distinctions between ".\ " or "@." or "." when not using
> english/american sentence spacing.
>
> Klaro?
Fine.
> OTOH, the stuff about '.' following closing parens or quotes [or
> vice-versa] is interesting --- I didn't realize that the LaTeX
> sentence spacing check kicks in there. That makes the LyX-side
> algorithm a tad more complicated.
For the truly anal there are a host of interesting spacing
exceptions. I'm afraid that I have not always given them
due attention, and I suspect that there are many that LyX has
also ignored to-date.
Rich
