Comments on Emacs v26 manual (part 15a)

[Marcin Borkowski]

Hello everyone,

I finally started proofreading the manual.  I'm sending the first batch
of my comments here, since I think that some of them may need some
discussion.  (In case of an obvious one: does it make sense to submit
a patch, or better push to a branch and write about it here?)

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- I would suggest adding some info about Org-mode (1. where one can
  find more information - both Info manual and website and 2. that it
  is a part of Emacs, though usually a newer version can be installed
  e.g. using Elpa)

- also, “turn” -> “turns” (p. 222, l. 12)

- p. 222, “mark the end of the next word” sounds strange to me, I’d
  prefer something like “put mark at the end...”.

- it might be valuable to mention the behavior of subsequent presses
  of (or a prefix argument to) M-@, although this is not strictly
  necessary (the docstring does it).

- p. 223, first line of paragraph 22.2: “Meta” is typed normally,
  whereas on the previous page it is written in typewriter font (l. 8
  from below).

- Since the convention of two spaces after a sentence is the source of
  many a flame war (see also https://xkcd.com/1285/), I would consider
  adding a paragraph like: “Although many people consider this
  convention obsolete and harmful, Emacs does not have any natural
  language processing algorithm which could help distinguish between a
  period after an abbreviation and a period after a sentence.
  Therefore, the machine needs human help with this task, and putting
  two spaces after a sentence seems a good way to do it.  Please also
  note that in many common file formats for editing texts in a human
  language (most notably, TeX and HTML), two spaces are equivalent to
  one, so there is no difference between them in the visible output.”
  (Admittedly, this needs some editing, but you get the idea.)  Also,
  maybe it’s worth adding that filling won’t destroy the sentence
  breaks, i.e., things like “e.g. this” won’t be broken (this is
  mentioned in the section about filling) and otoh things like
  “sentence end.\nAnd this is the next one” will get two spaces when
  put on the same line (this is not).
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Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski