Re: How many spaces after a period?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Gary,

    will texinfo render badly spaced dvi (or other) if we use single
    spaces after a period, or even if we are inconsistent throughout an
    input document?

DVI isn't the problem (TeX always does the right thing). Info is the
problem. Makeinfo does cheap text refilling. So if a sentence happens
to end at the end of an input line.
Like that, then Makeinfo will insert two spaces, even though it does not
alter sentence spacing in mid-line. So, the output will be inconsistent:

  ... refilling. So if ... an input line.  Like that, ...

even though I consistently used one space after all the periods I typed
in that paragraph.

Clearly this insertion of two spaces (if not frenchspacing) could be an
option in Texinfo.  But since there is 25 years of history saying that
Texinfo input documents should have two spaces, and GNU text in general,
I'm not enchanted at the idea of spending time supporting the other
convention.

    avoid having to count spaces during patch reviews.  

Completely understandable :).

    If double spaces turn out to be required in texinfo, then I'll write
    a maintainer make rule to check for violations 

I think that's the path of least resistance.

    For example, HTML really doesn't care, and renders output consistently

.. and suboptimally ... (anyway)

Happy spacing,
k