Re: End-of-sentence spacing

[Dave Kemper]

On 12/19/20, Dorai Sitaram <ds26gte@yahoo.com> wrote:
> groff pretty much forces one to use two spaces after sentence-ending
> punctuation, unless it's at the end of a source line. Is there a way to
> avoid this, so that the space is uniform regardless of whether the ending
> punctuation occurs mid- or end-line?

Using 0 as the second parameter of the .ss request results in the same
space being put between words and between sentences.

> (I could resign myself to always type
> 2 spaces after every sentence, but convention has moved away from this type
> of unergonomic typing, and it's difficult to do it just for groff.)

I'd turn this around, and ask what other applications misbehave if you
type two spaces between sentences?  I type that way across the board
with no noticeable down side.  Developing the habit of typing
everything with two spaces between sentences aids the writing process,
because it's easy to do searches to find sentence boundaries (and some
text editors have keystrokes that recognizes such sentence boundaries
automatically).

If your final copy requires that sentences be separated by only one
space, it's easy to squeeze out the extra space with a simple search
and replace (whereas the opposite is impossible to do with an
algorithm, because so many different punctuation combinations can end
sentences, and algorithms can't always distinguish between a period
ending a sentence and a period indicating an abbreviation).

But you'll probably find that leaving the extra spaces in doesn't
cause any problems, no matter what the application is.  Anything
displayed in HTML will squeeze it out anyway on display.  Other
applications will show it, but what is the down side to that?  In
informal contexts such as email and online chat tools, there almost
certainly is none.  In material that needs to be typeset to modern
convention, where sentences don't get extra space, whatever typesetter
you're using will almost certainly handle this.