Re: Spaces after periods

[David Kastrup]

John Wiegley <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> +with the Greek lambda character @samp{λ}. In a TeX buffer, it will
>>                                            ^^     ^^^
>> Two spaces between sentences, please (we use the US English
>> conventions).
>
> I almost hate to say this, but I'm not sure this is the English
> convention anymore.

It is the Emacs convention, however, making it possible for Emacs to
distinguish abbreviations from sentence ends when wrapping lines.  It is
modelled after the conventions for _typewriters_.  Typewriting fonts are
monospace, and as a text editor rather than a word processor, typical
Emacs usage involves quite a bit of monospace fonts.

> A quick Google shows many, many sites that indicate that the modern
> convention is now one space, and none that recommend two spaces.

I suspect that it's more of a "trust your word processor to figure out
the proper spacing" thing.

> I've even changed to one space in my e-mails, even, after being a long
> holdout for the two space rule.

Well, Emacs does not wrap lines nicely with single spaces.  You can, of
course, customize sentence-end-double-space.  But then Emacs can no
longer distinguish sentence ends from abbreviations reliably.

-- 
David Kastrup