Re: End-of-sentence spacing

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Dorai,

the point behind the end-of-source-line rule is simple, and is hidden in
many introductory chapters of textbooks on troff and groff: You are not
forced (and even less encouraged) to preempt any formatting in your
input text. None of your efforts with regard to line length, intended
line breaks etc. you try to express in self-imposed "pretty-typing" will
spill over to the groff formatter. The formatting engine will only, I
repeat: only obey to explicit commands. Hitting <CR> after a sentence
period is such an explicit command and is as economical in terms of
keystroke counts as it can be. Leave the formatting effort to groff
(which does a better job than a human trying to mimick ascii formatting)
and concentrate on the semantics of what you type, and you'll see that
this is much easier than to remember and verify if all of your
end-of-sentence full stops were followed by two spaces instead of one,
which is actually not a good idea at all because the formatter (and
associated macro packages) might have a different idea how an
end-of-sentence--new-sentence distance should look like, e.g. in
languages other than English. It might be a space only, a space and a
half, always assuming that a space is some kind of fixed length. French
is a good example of punctuation mark rules which look weird to
non-French readers but which visually "make sense" in fine examples of
French typography. German doesn't have a "two spaces is new sentence"
concept either.

troff, from the very onset of its conception, is a fine example of why
we have division of labour, and if the designer and the user of a tool
share this understanding, the tool can be put to better use.

Please accept my apologies if I sounded rant-ish, this was not my
intent. The question simply scratched me at a sensitive point. I once
organized a collaborative effort to reproduce a text which featured
around 250,000 words in eight (yes: 8) formatting variants (due to the
number of languages represented). When planning the project, the sheer
magnitude of these numbers made me analyze and identify potential error
sources in the clerical work involved, and the number of keystrokes (and
their impact on the effort to achieve a well-formed and valid source
text) every colleague would require to finish the task was by far not a
minor concern. In this context, using two spaces where one <CR> would
have produced the desired result rather than with two spaces producing a
faint lookalike which misguides the formatting engine was one of the
no-go areas identified.

Oliver.


On 19/12/2020 11:57, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, Ulrich Lauther wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 10:27:01AM +0000, Dorai Sitaram wrote:
> > > groff pretty much forces one to use two spaces after sentence-ending
> > > punctuation, unless it's at the end of a source line.
> >
> > In my opinion it is good style to start every sentence on a new
> > source line.
>
> We use this as a rule and have for decades.
>
> Regards - Damian
>
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