Space after Periods

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Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 00:24:57 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9307010524.AA00009@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Space after Periods
In-reply-to: <199306302350.AA26940@ora.com>
References: <199306302350.AA26940@ora.com>
X-Md4-Signature: 215e51b4b57436061e3345cb349acd8f
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.  I noticed today that Xmosaic 1.2 (and presumably 
> earlier versions) automatically provide this extra space after
> all periods.
> 
> That didn't surprise me, as Tex does the same thing; in Tex you
> have to escape a period after an abbreviation such as U.N.\ like
> that to avoid this extra space.  
> 
> How would it be reasonable to deal with this issue?  Is it a 
> text-widget matter?

NO!

:-)

But seriously, how is a text widget supposed to know where a sentence
ends and where it doesn't?  That sort of syntactic analysis we can't
do...

> Do we need something in the DTD?  Would
> a character entity (for "period-in-abbreviation") make sense?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Terry Allen  (terry@ora.com)
> Editor, Digital Media Group
> O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
> Sebastopol, Calif., 95472

How about backslash space?  (The heretic strikes again...)

Cheers,
Marc