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White space (Was: Graph package, etc.)
From: |
Jerry Pendergraft |
Subject: |
White space (Was: Graph package, etc.) |
Date: |
Wed, 9 Feb 94 11:35:56 CST |
address@hidden (Jeff Kingston) writes:
[...]
> I see that people are ganging up against me on the matter of white
> space. Certainly it would not be hard to add a TeX-like space
> munching style to the style information, alongside the font,
> paragraph breaking, and hyphenation style information. But how
> would you get two spaces between sentences then? If the answer is
> to define . to be "." &2s and similarly for ! and ? (quite
> feasible), you get two spaces after Mr. too. I don't think this is
> a good design at all, I think it's unnecessarily complicated and
> means that the user has to learn things about how to deal with the
> exceptional cases. Of course, TeX users have already learned these
> things, but the rest of us don't want to. Prove me wrong about this
> if you can!
> Jeff Kingston
I don't think "wrong" is the correct term but here are my thoughts.
- First Lout is supposed to be totally ignorant (internally) about any
formatting rules etc. Therefore to have such things as "two spaces
between sentences" built in breaks such a rule.
- Second, such things as "two spaces between sentences" is language
dependant if not totally american english specific.
- Finally the special rules such as "two spaces between sentences
(that is about punctuation)" SHOULD be implemented by definitions,
so they (and their particular characteristics) can be selected as
desired according to language or taste. An example that comes to
mind is French where end of sentence punctuation is spaced away
from the last word, hence needing a different definition anyway.
as: Comprenez-vous ?
- The TeX treatment of [excess] white space makes it very easy to
create source text that is almost as readable as the typeset text.
The obvious example is tabular material, but anything that is
"rearranged" by the typesetting process fits this class.
- The need to insert extra white space is relatively rare in general
practice so tolerates extra effort in those cases. The occasional
need for two\ \ spaces or one inch\hspace{1i}space is not IMHO a
big deal.
--
Jerry Pendergraft Internet: address@hidden
MS-T408 UUCP: uunet!medtron!jerry.pendergraft
Medtronic, Inc ATT: 1-612-574-4026
7000 Central Ave NE.
Minneapolis, MN 55432-3576
- White space (Was: Graph package, etc.),
Jerry Pendergraft <=