On 20. okt. 2011 15:37, Murat Yildizoglu wrote:
Capitals are definitely manual in Latex, but I seem to remember that TeX
was able to manage spaces in a contextual way. Also, isn't Babel
supposed to handle some typographical spaces?
Yes, spacing is handled to some extent. LaTeX simply ignores extra
spaces (more than one space in a row), so LyX does not allow such
spaces so users won't think that they can create long spaces this way.
In ASCII, "space" is a character just like a letter or numeral. In
typography, space is just room between words. Such room can have
varying size or even be stretchable. Concepts like "1 space" or "2
spaces" is meaningless - you (or LaTeX) uses as much space as needed.
This is not limited to an integer amount of some standard space length -
you can have exactly the amount of space you want. 1mm, 0.1mm, 10cm, ...
LaTeX takes the typographic approach. Interword spacing varies in order
to justify text. And similiar for the vertical space between headings
and paragraphs. There are no fixed character positions, and no
fixed-height lines either.
LaTeX knows that there should be more space after a period, in some
languages. (And no such thing in some other languages). But only if the
period ends a sentence. Sometimes periods don't end the sentence,
LaTeX tries to detect this by checking if the following character is
upper or lower case. This fail sometimes, the period in "Mr. Smith" does
not end a sentence, even if an uppercase character follows. LaTeX offer
a non-ending period for such cases.
This is second-guessing, but the alternative would be to do something
special everytime a sentence ends.
Helge Hafting
