[texhax] Differentiating sentences in a paragraph

[Schwartz, Steven J]

Two spaces pre-dates the computer world of course. I remember taking typing lessons on a manual typewriter while in high school (50 years ago). We were taught to hit the space bar twice after a sentence. Of course, there was no choice of font, no proportional spacing, and if you hit the wrong key you pulled out the piece of paper (and real carbon paper if you were making a cc) and started again.

No, I don't look upon that era as "the good old days." but I'm perfectly content for TeX to handle the end of a sentence and to manually insert a hard space if it gets it wrong.

Steve

-----------
Steve Schwartz
Space and Atmospheric Physics
Imperial College London
Tel 020 7594 7660

On 17 Jan 2013, at 09:22, "Neal H. Walfield" <neal at walfield.org> wrote:

> At Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:52:31 -0700,
> Gordon Haverland wrote:
>> Sure, in a UTF-8 world, there could be a special end-of-sentence 
>> chracter and a special end-of-paragraph character.
> 
> In an ASCII world, there is no special end-of-sentence marker and two
> spaces became a common convention to mark the end of a sentence.
> 
> It is so common, in fact, that Emacs offers sentence motion commands
> (M-e, M-a) to move the mark between sentences.  Emacs recognizes the
> end of a sentence period by looking to see whether it is followed by
> two spaces.  This functionality was documented in GNU Emacs 18.59,
> which was released on October 30, 1992.  Version 18.59 is the earliest
> version that I found.  Most likely it was added even earlier.
> 
> I just found out that vi also offers similar commands ('(' and ')'),
> but I don't know how old they are or how they recognize an end of
> sentence.
> 
> Neal
> 
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