Re: Space after Periods

fortuity!kehoe@uu6.psi.com (Daniel Miles Kehoe)

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Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 13:32:59 -0700
From: fortuity!kehoe@uu6.psi.com (Daniel Miles Kehoe)
Message-id: <9307012032.AA00774@fortuity.sf.ca.us>
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Subject: Re: Space after Periods
Cc: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Status: RO

Terry Allen writes:
> Rendered text usually has more space after a period that closes
> a sentence than after a period that marks an abbreviation, 

> or a comma.

Wait a second.... is the model a typewritten page or a published  
page? Typists follow the rule of adding an extra space between  
sentences within a paragraph. The rule for books (and by extension,  
anything that does not use a fixed-pitch, monospaced font) is to use  
the same space between sentences as between words. (I checked the  
standard references, both "Words into Type" and the "Chicago Manual  
of Style," on this.)

> in Tex you have to escape a period after an abbreviation

I'm not a Tex user, so I don't know why Tex adds the extra space. But  
it seems to me that there should be no issue here. 

A WWW document (which uses proportional fonts) should have the same  
space between sentences as between words. 

Besides, it's easier that way.

Regards,
Daniel Kehoe
kehoe@fortuity.sf.ca.us