On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, 9:56:30 AM, Mary Bull wrote: MB> I think that this "one space" between the full stop (period) and the MB> capital (upper case) letter of the following sentence is a MB> convention agreed upon in most word processors and probably the MB> authors of TB! are just following the word-processor programmers.
It used to be, in the days of typewriters, that you put two spaces at the end of a sentence. However with the advent of word-processors, and specifically with the advent of full-justification of paragraphs (ie where each line spreads out to both left & right margins), the double-space leads to some...uh, interesting...results. You get huge gaps where you had two spaces. So the convention then became to leave only one space between sentences. The "one-space" system is now the accepted norm, but if you're using left-justification it really doesn't matter too much, as it doesn't make a lot of difference to the appearance of the text. Since I'm unlikely to use a typewriter regularly at any time in the future, I choose to stick with the one-space system, purely for simplicity :-) -- Deborah ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
