Re: proposal for inter-word spaces

[Blake McBride]

I think the inter-word space proposal is inconsistent for several reasons
as follows:

1.  Why auto-add the extra space only when it ends at the end of the line?
That option may be worse then the way things are now - sometimes you get
the extra space, and then again, sometimes you don't - it depends on the
position of the stars!

This must be consistent!  Either you get the space or you don't!  
I can not write when I have to keep worrying about where my
sentences end or, worse yet, where my text editor wraps things!!
This solution is far worse then the way things work now.

You can detect an end of sentence as follows:  A lower case letter, followed 
by any number of end of sentence characters (to handle "What?!"), followed
by a space character or newline.  The few times this is not an end of sentence
you can handle explicitly as follows "Dr.~Kingston".  This appears
_much_ less frequently!  By doing it this way you get consistent results
and can explicitly handle the _fewer_ exceptions.  If you miss one of those
exceptions the result is much less damaging then other alternatives anyway.

2.  Instead of adding an extra space as you indicated lets think about this.
Make a variable and add (roughly) that much space at the end of sentences
as a factor.  For example, if the variable is set to 1.5, you put 1.5
times the width of a normal space character between sentences.  This has
two advantages: 1) you can fine tune the look of your document with a single
variable (you know 1.5 vs. 2.0, etc.); or 2) you can stop the extra space
stuff by just setting the variable to 1.0 !!

3.  The auto compress option is good.  Used in conjunction with my previous
suggestions things would work as follows:  If you have compress off and the
sentence variable set to 1.0 things work as they do now.  However if you
turn compression on and set the variable to 1.8 you get nice and _consistent_
inter sentence space without having to touch (or worry about) your source 
text!!!

It is nice to be able to fine tune the look of your document without having
to adjust the source text.  Source text format _must_ be disassociated with
output format in order to be able to modify global aspects of your document
without having to re-format your input text.

4.  As you suggested the compress option used in conjunction to your 
line/sentence
ending algorithm is entirely useless.  

Just some, rather strong, thoughts...  :-)

--blake


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Blake McBride                           Algorithms Corporation
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