Re: inter-word spacing (initials)

[Alan Bowen <acbowen@princeton.edu>]

Thanks, Peter. You are right about (Plain) TeX--I just got into the  
habit of inserting them.

Defining my own macro to reproduce the control space is a possibility,  
and I will do that IF the current behavior of “.\ ’ and the tilde in  
MKII is not  remedied. (I have not switched to MKIV yet, but wonder  
what happens there.) The downside is that there is a good number of  
documents  that will require have to be encoded accordingly.

Cheers, Alan

On Jul 18, 2008, at 14;40,39 , Peter Rolf wrote:

> Alan Bowen schrieb:
>> My original query has generated some interesting sidelines but no
>> solution, at least none that I can see. So, with all due apologies, I
>> shall presume on your patience by restating my query.
>>
>> In (English) typography the spacing after a period within a sentence
>> is less that that after a period at the end of a sentence. Since the
>> days of Plain TeX, one achieved the proper spacing after an intra-
>> sentence period by entering “.\<space>”. My problem is that this no
>> longer seems to work with recent versions of ConTeXt/MKII: “. 
>> \<space>”
>> does not seem to have any effect at all.
>>
> are you sure of that?
>
> a citation from "The TeXbook", chapter 12: Glue
>
> "Another way to get TeX to put out a normal space is to type '\ '
> (control space); e.g., 'Mr.\ Drofnats' would be almost the same as
> 'Mr.~Drofnats', exept that a line might end after the 'Mr.'. "
>
> also: you don't need a control space here
>
> from the exercise 12.5:
>
> "TeX doesn't consider a period or question mark or exclamation point  
> to
> be the end of a sentence if the preceding character is an uppercase
> letter, since TeX assumes that such uppercase letters are most likely
> somebody's initials'. "
>
>
> what you want is just a smaller skip. so how about a *local* use of
> something like
>
> \def\ {\thinspace}%
>
> donno if this is possible (side effects) in your environment. maybe  
> one
> of the gurus can give an answer. anyhow, interesting stuff :)
>
>
> best wishes, peter
>
>> So, how are we now to get the proper spacing after an intra-sentence
>> period? Are there some language/spacing commands that need to be
>> invoked in the prelims now?
>>
>> Sample text:
>> \starttext
>>
>> A. E. Samuels and other scholars.  The community of time{-}keepers.
>>
>> A.\ E.\ Samuels and other scholars. The community of time{-}keepers.
>>
>> \stoptext
>>
>> Alan
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If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
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