second proposal for inter-word spaces

[Jeff Kingston]

Following the underwhelming response to my first proposal for new
options to control the way that Lout handles spaces in its input,
I've read carefully through all the mail, done some thinking, and
come up with this, my second proposal.

I've come to believe that introducing clever new ways to solve this
problem is probably not a good idea, for the following reasons:

(1)  We are in danger of creating a Tower of Babel here, with
     everyone using slightly different settings;
     
(2)  Future document formatting systems would be faced with the
     problem of reproducing an even larger set of favourite
     conventions than there are now;
     
(3)  Although the discussion has often been in general terms, it
     seems clear that virtually all of it is coming from people
     who are either happy with the troff method or who are happy
     with the TeX method.

So my proposal is to add these three options to the @Space symbol,
also settable in an @InitialSpace option as in the first proposal:

     lout @Space         Treat white space the way Lout does now

     troff @Space        Treat white space the way troff does

     tex @Space          Treat white space the way TeX does

I intend "troff" and "tex" to be faithful replicas of the other systems,
except that I would add some means of making at least the initial settings
language-specific.  The default behaviour would have to be "lout", because
the discussion has proved that there is no consensus for changing it.

There would also be symbols, probably ~ and ~~, to force inter-word and
inter-sentence spacing, and an option for setting the inter-sentence
spacing.

Comments please.

Jeff Kingston
address@hidden