White space (Was: Graph package, etc.)

[Jerry Pendergraft]

address@hidden (Jeff Kingston) writes:

[...]

> 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!

> Jeff Kingston

I don't think "wrong" is the correct term but here are my thoughts.

 - First Lout is supposed to be totally ignorant (internally) about any
   formatting rules etc. Therefore to have such things as "two spaces
   between sentences" built in breaks such a rule.

 - Second, such things as "two spaces between sentences" is language
   dependant if not totally american english specific.

 - Finally the special rules such as "two spaces between sentences
   (that is about punctuation)" SHOULD be implemented by definitions,
   so they (and their particular characteristics) can be selected as
   desired according to language or taste. An example that comes to
   mind is French where end of sentence punctuation is spaced away
   from the last word, hence needing a different definition anyway.
   as: Comprenez-vous ?

 - The TeX treatment of [excess] white space makes it very easy to
   create source text that is almost as readable as the typeset text.
   The obvious example is tabular material, but anything that is
   "rearranged" by the typesetting process fits this class.

 - The need to insert extra white space is relatively rare in general
   practice so tolerates extra effort in those cases. The occasional
   need for two\ \ spaces or one inch\hspace{1i}space is not IMHO a
   big deal.

-- 
Jerry Pendergraft               Internet: address@hidden
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