Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in <20201106225422.GD99027(a)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)