> I personally love this quote: >> Your typing as well as yyour typesetting will benefit from >> unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. As a general rule, no more >> than a single space is required after a period, colon, or any other >> mark of punctuation.
> I honestly didn't know they had typewriters in Victorian times. Did > they? According to this site, the invention dates back to 1700: http://www.ladytypewriter.co.uk/typewriter-timeline.htm By late 19th century the typewriter was pretty much old hat. See this glorious unit from 1897: http://www.ladytypewriter.co.uk/blick-7.htm >> As far as the word wrapping of the Bat is concerned: it is just harder >> (impossible?) to come up with an algorithm that takes two spaces at >> the end of sentences into account. How should this algorithm >> distinguish between abbreviations and sentence ending periods (full >> stops)? > If you can distinguish them (based on a set of internalised rules), so > can a computer. Just put these rules into an algorithm. ;-) Some of these rules are heuristic or culture-bound, not algorithmic, I'm afraid. How about this (contrived but realistic) example: "This doctoral dissertation investigates the use of early 20th-century U.S. colloquial speech in the poetry of W.C. Williams, a distinguished American modernist." After "U.S.", you have it easy: the subsequent word doesn't start with a capital letter, so it's not a sentence break. But I don't believe you can come up with a generalized algorithmic rule that will figure out that the sentence does not end at W.C., unless the rule knows about American poets and can parse English syntax. It has to do both, since "W.C." can mean something entirely, um, else. The double initial is not a clue: substitute a name with a single initial, or a full name with a middle initial instead. You could try a rule that says "a single capital letter followed by a period does NOT end a sentence", but that rule fails in simplest cases such as "She was supposed to meet him at gate C. Williams was getting anxious." .marek -- No ads, no nags freeware: http://keynote.prv.pl (KeyNote, PhoneDeck, KookieJar, Oubliette) "This seems like a case where we need to shoot the messenger." (Charlie Kaufman on Cypherpunks list) ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
