The bat of happiness fluttered its wings and whispered to me that
Dierk Haasis said on Thursday, October 12, 2000:
>> Oops -- one more thing where TB! thinks it knows better than you do.
>> If you format a paragraph in TB! and you've used two spaces after the
>> period (like most Americans were taught in typing class), TB! turns it
>> into a single space. Well, I've got news for you, TB! developers --
>> it shouldn't matter whether I've put one or two or fifteen spaces
>> after a period. That's none of your business.
> Well, I never understood this double space behaviour in American texts I
> got, now you tell me ... Can you even tell me *why* you were taught this
> way? Europeans usually make one, maybe a sign of parsimony?! ;-)
I don't know. Tradition?
But the point isn't which is "correct". Neither is. Well, actually
my way is, by definition, but I won't press the point ;-) I think the
important point is that users ought to be free to put spaces in their
paragraphs, type in all lowercase, and do all manner of things without
their email client butting in.
And why? Because formatting a paragraph's line lengths is a different
thing from formatting within the line. They're two different
functions. And afaik, TB!'s way of doing things is unique. Take good
old fmt(1). This is what its manpage says:
"The fmt command both joins and splits lines to achieve the desired
width, but words are never joined or split; spaces are always
preserved, and lines are split at spaces only. In effect, fmt ignores
newline characters in the input and wraps words to make lines a close
as possible to width bytes, resulting in individual lines of varying
length but a consistent (new) text width overall. Because blank lines
are always preserved, fmt does not merge paragraphs separated by blank
lines."
The prosecution rests.
Re the "ahem": could I say that TB! f-rn-c-tes with my text?
;-)
--
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net
"No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding
empirical evidence." - Ann Landers
--
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