Re: RFC: new vertical layout engine

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 06:49:13AM -0400, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Graham,
>
>> Oh, in case anybody was wondering: my father is pure native
>> British, educated at Oxford, and considers the 1978 Fowler's
>> Modern English second revised edition (printed in Oxford) to be
>> the definitive guide to English writing.  There's no American
>> influence here!
>
> So what does Fowler's (both 1978 and the most recent edition) say about 
> the matter?

We didn't end up looking in it, since he pointed out that it was a
guide about English writing, not typography.  He admitted that
"all" commercial printers use one space in their works, although he
suggested that it might depend on the type of font.

The wikipedia page about this also notes that the effect of
double-spacing a fixed-width font is similar to the effect of an
em space (which some people use in single-spaced proportional
fonts).


So: we will continue to double-space sentences in the doc source,
but generate single-spaced output.

Cheers,
- Graham