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Re: paragraphs.el: do forward-sentence and friends not work?


From: David Reitter
Subject: Re: paragraphs.el: do forward-sentence and friends not work?
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:10:48 +0000

On 13 Feb 2008, at 20:00, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Because AFAIK it's still Chicago Manual of Style-standard to follow a
sentence-ending period with two spaces in typed documents.  (Even with
a proportional font, Emacs will not insert extra visual space to
delimit a sentence unless it's present in the document.)

I don't have the Chicago Manual of Style here, but may I quote from Wikipedia (from the French_spacing article):

===
Recently some widely-used American style guides, notably the Chicago Manual of Style, call for a single space after full stops and colons. [86][87] In chapter 6 Punctuation section 3 Typographic and Aesthetic Considerations, for example, the Chicago Manual of Style states:

    6.11 Space between sentences

In typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation [sic] that ends a sentence, whether a period, a colon [sic], a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks. The FAQ to the Chicago Manual of Style explicitly states that the "traditional American practice" is to double-space after colons and periods (without mentioning semi-colons) but then states that "This practice is discouraged by the University of Chicago Press".[88]
===

But whatever the manual says, why impose on the user?


On 13 Feb 2008, at 20:36, Stefan Monnier wrote:

The problem is that "half the world" doesn't know that "the other half"
uses 2-spaces after a ".".  So the docstring of
sentence-end-double-space should probably explain that this is
a convention used throughout North America (AFAICT).

I wonder whether this is either something that should be part of MULE.
Or, won't setting `sentence-end-double-space' to nil make it work in most other cases? The regular expression could be improved to recognize abbreviations correctly.







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