Re: rule for period and sentence ending

[John Darrington]

Possibly you are right.  I think the answer is largely historical.  That is
how TeX works and has done for 30 years.

The style wars regarding the placement of dots has always been a controversial
one.   Should one write :


 These are the methods of the N.S.A.

or 

 These are the methods of the NSA.

I think the former was perfered 30 years back.  Today the latter style is 
comming into favour.


However, TeX is not going to change now, so I doubt Texinfo will either.
Period!




On Sun, Aug 04, 2013 at 04:05:38AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
     Hi,
     
     The current rule for sentence ending is:
     
     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
     14.3.3 Ending a Sentence
     ------------------------
     
     As mentioned above, Texinfo normally inserts additional space after the
     end of a sentence.  It uses a simple heuristic for this: a sentence ends
     with a period, exclamation point, or question mark followed by optional
     closing punctuation and then whitespace, and _not_ preceded by a capital
     letter.
     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
     
     I wonder why such an exception "_not_ preceded by a capital letter".
     It seems a bad choice. Some acronyms end with a capital letter, and
     such acronyms are usually written without periods, so that most often
     Texinfo will do a wrong guess. See the acronyms on
     
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
     
     for instance. An acronym can also mix cases and end with a capital
     letter, e.g. "NaN" (for Not-a-Number).
     
     IMHO, the exception should be removed, or changed to: except in the
     case of a period preceded by a sequence of letters consisting of only
     one capital letter.
     
     -- 
     Vincent Lefèvre <address@hidden> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
     100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
     Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)

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