Thanks, Peter. You are right about (Plain) TeX--I just got into the habit of inserting them.
Defining my own macro to reproduce the control space is a possibility, and I will do that IF the current behavior of “.\ ’ and the tilde in MKII is not remedied. (I have not switched to MKIV yet, but wonder what happens there.) The downside is that there is a good number of documents that will require have to be encoded accordingly. Cheers, Alan On Jul 18, 2008, at 14;40,39 , Peter Rolf wrote: > Alan Bowen schrieb: >> My original query has generated some interesting sidelines but no >> solution, at least none that I can see. So, with all due apologies, I >> shall presume on your patience by restating my query. >> >> In (English) typography the spacing after a period within a sentence >> is less that that after a period at the end of a sentence. Since the >> days of Plain TeX, one achieved the proper spacing after an intra- >> sentence period by entering “.\<space>”. My problem is that this no >> longer seems to work with recent versions of ConTeXt/MKII: “. >> \<space>” >> does not seem to have any effect at all. >> > are you sure of that? > > a citation from "The TeXbook", chapter 12: Glue > > "Another way to get TeX to put out a normal space is to type '\ ' > (control space); e.g., 'Mr.\ Drofnats' would be almost the same as > 'Mr.~Drofnats', exept that a line might end after the 'Mr.'. " > > also: you don't need a control space here > > from the exercise 12.5: > > "TeX doesn't consider a period or question mark or exclamation point > to > be the end of a sentence if the preceding character is an uppercase > letter, since TeX assumes that such uppercase letters are most likely > somebody's initials'. " > > > what you want is just a smaller skip. so how about a *local* use of > something like > > \def\ {\thinspace}% > > donno if this is possible (side effects) in your environment. maybe > one > of the gurus can give an answer. anyhow, interesting stuff :) > > > best wishes, peter > >> So, how are we now to get the proper spacing after an intra-sentence >> period? Are there some language/spacing commands that need to be >> invoked in the prelims now? >> >> Sample text: >> \starttext >> >> A. E. Samuels and other scholars. The community of time{-}keepers. >> >> A.\ E.\ Samuels and other scholars. The community of time{-}keepers. >> >> \stoptext >> >> Alan >> ___________________________________________________________________________________ >> If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an >> entry to the Wiki! >> >> maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / >> http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context >> webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net >> archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ >> wiki : http://contextgarden.net >> ___________________________________________________________________________________ >> > > ___________________________________________________________________________________ > If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an > entry to the Wiki! > > maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context > webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net > archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ > wiki : http://contextgarden.net > ___________________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________