From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > At 13:29 -0400 2003-07-07, Frank da Cruz wrote: > > >Nobody is springing to the defense of this so I'll only say that > >it's a time-honored practice and we shouldn't be so quick to > >disparage it, lest we be disparaged several years hence for the > >things we do :-) > > It's rotten, and when I typeset books > (http://www.evertype.com/books.html) I always have to clean up the > text which is invariably littered with these artifacts of old > technology.
I do the same thing: I compress all blanks with an invariable and automatic search&replace... before actually formatting the text with rich-text enhancements or markup. Multiple spaces are a real pollution when preparing a text for publishing... I do the same space normalization when preparing delimited or fixed text datafiles for import in a database table (I don't trust the behavior of the SQL CHAR(n) datatype)
