From: Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>
To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:29:01 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20201106232901.AkY2I%steffen@sdaoden.eu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com>
Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in
<20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com>:
|On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote:
|>> I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors
|>> used 2... who knows why? :).
|>
|> Typewriters.
|>
|> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
|> we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of-
|> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
|> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
|> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.
|
|FWIW, this is the US convention. Other countries have different
|conventions. My Ausinfo style manual states
|
| There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the
| end of a sentence.
|
|I believe that this also holds for Germany. I'm not sure that the UK
|didn't have different rules again.
Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the
punctuation characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question-
and exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace. The
next word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step").
However, typewriters often place(d) those characters left in
a cell, so that the visual appearance is accordingly.
In novels around 66 characters is the recommendation i seem to
recall. I have that in mails, 72 in other text modes, and 79 for
everything else. (The latter lead to lots of ugly code once
i used tabulators, but different tabulator spacing would have
resulted in different look in $PAGER and $VISUAL, so ...)
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-11-06 23:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 33+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-11-05 22:10 Tyler Adams
2020-11-06 0:39 ` Kevin Bowling
2020-11-06 1:41 ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-06 5:04 ` John Cowan
2020-11-06 5:16 ` Steve Nickolas
2020-11-06 6:34 ` Rob Pike
2020-11-06 13:20 ` Will Senn
2020-11-06 15:07 ` Clem Cole
2020-11-06 15:40 ` Will Senn
2020-11-06 15:46 ` Chris Torek
2020-11-06 22:54 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-11-06 23:29 ` Steffen Nurpmeso [this message]
2020-11-06 22:31 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-11-06 23:41 ` Warren Toomey
2020-11-06 6:37 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-11-06 15:06 ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-06 15:18 ` Bakul Shah
2020-11-06 15:19 ` Chris Torek
2020-11-06 16:46 ` Stephen Clark
2020-11-06 18:51 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-11-06 22:09 ` John Cowan
2020-11-06 22:44 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-11-06 22:12 ` Andy Kosela
2020-11-06 22:23 ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-07 0:16 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-11-08 23:23 ` George Michaelson
2020-11-06 17:05 ` Paul Winalski
2020-11-06 17:07 ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-06 17:25 ` Warner Losh
2020-11-06 17:13 ` Adam Thornton
2020-11-06 17:26 ` Stephen Clark
2020-11-06 18:24 ` John Cowan
2020-11-06 21:10 ` Dave Horsfall
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