Re: whitespace

[Ed Frank]

Jeff wrote:

> I see that people are ganging up against me on the matter
> of white space.  Certainly it would not be hard to add a
> TeX-like space munching style to the style information,
> alongside the font, paragraph breaking, and hyphenation
> style information.  But how would you get two spaces
> between sentences then?  If the answer is to define .
> to be "." &2s and similarly for ! and ? (quite feasible),
> you get two spaces after Mr. too.  I don't think this is
> a good design at all, I think it's unnecessarily complicated
> and means that the user has to learn things about how to
> deal with the exceptional cases.  Of course, TeX users have
> already learned these things, but the rest of us don't want
> to.  Prove me wrong about this if you can!

You are entirely right, so I won't attempt to prove you wrong;
however, it is a question of taste. When I write, I don't want to
think about typesetting.  That's why I don't use WYSIWYG.  Having to
worry about extra spaces is similiar- they occur accidentally in
a real document quite often, especially when including text from other
authors.  Hunting them down is a royal pain in just about any editor.

Your example of "Mr." is a problem, but it happens only infrequently,
so I'm willing to do a little more work occasionally in exchange for
not thinking about white space constantly.

I can see why people don't want to learn the TeX like rules and
escapes that are a consequence of having a white-space muncher, but
why not have it as an option, for those of us who don't want to hunt
for spaces?  Can it coexist in the code as an option, or is it an
either/or, fundamental part of the program?

Hmmm.  Somehow, my note doesn't seem very persuasive.  How about,
"Whaaaaa!  I just want it!"  :-)


        -Ed

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Ed Frank                                             Department of Physics     
Office:  (215)898-5979                               University of Pennsylvania
address@hidden                          Philadelphia, PA  USA