Space after Periods

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 1 Jul 93 00:24:57 -0500


Terry Allen writes:
> Rendered text usually has more space after a period that closes
> a sentence than after a period that marks an abbreviation,
> or a comma. I noticed today that Xmosaic 1.2 (and presumably
> earlier versions) automatically provide this extra space after
> all periods.
>
> That didn't surprise me, as Tex does the same thing; in Tex you
> have to escape a period after an abbreviation such as U.N.\ like
> that to avoid this extra space.
>
> How would it be reasonable to deal with this issue? Is it a
> text-widget matter?

NO!

:-)

But seriously, how is a text widget supposed to know where a sentence
ends and where it doesn't? That sort of syntactic analysis we can't
do...

> Do we need something in the DTD? Would
> a character entity (for "period-in-abbreviation") make sense?
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)
> Editor, Digital Media Group
> O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
> Sebastopol, Calif., 95472

How about backslash space? (The heretic strikes again...)

Cheers,
Marc