Re: Re: Weird behavior of fill-paragraph.

[kevin.gal]

>It's not related to the language, it's related to the culture.
>The double-space thingy is taught in the US schools (for
>reasons that are a mystery to me; perhaps someone could
>explain them), so people coming from that culture have
>double-space wired into their brains.

For those of us old enough to remember being taught to type in a Typing class 
in high school, in the U.S.A, on a real old fashion typewriter (not event 
electric, in my case), we were taught to put two spaces after a period at the 
end of sentence for a very good reason.  Since all typewriters, in those days, 
used fixed width fonts, placing two spaces at the end of each sentence made it 
easier to read the paragraph.  We were also taught to put two spaces after a 
colon and always to put a blank line between paragraphs for the very same 
reason:  it makes the typed sentences and paragraphs less crowded and, 
therefore, easier on the eyes to read.

In the U.S.A., today, most students learn to type in what are now called 
"Keyboarding" classes using a PC word processor (usually MS Word) using 
variable width fonts.  Unless taught by a old timer who refuses to break old 
habits, these classes do NOT instruct the student to type a double space after 
a period when using variable width fonts!  MS Word, for example, will highlight 
double spaces entered by the user after a period (and after a colon) to 
recommend to the user that the extra space should be deleted.

So, the technique of counting the number of spaces after a period, to determine 
if that period is terminating a sentence, is an outdated technique, especially 
when using a variable length font.