Re: description writing guide

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 05-Dec-02, 16:49 (CST), "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" <tb@becket.net> wrote: 
> It is not possible for an automated renderer to figure out where
> sentence boundaries are without some kind of help, and a mere period
> is not sufficient help.  So, a good convention to establish might be
> that the string ".  " indicates the end of a sentence, and ". " does
> not. 

While technically valid, I don't like his much, for a couple of
reasons:

1. I suspect it will be very hard to get this consistently used
in Debian descriptions, as there are a lot of people who do not
naturally use the 'period-two-spaces' convention. (I suspect it is
entirely determined by how much typing one did on real typewriters,
pre-wordprocessor.)

2. IMO, the naive rendering of ".<sp><sp>" looks fairly dreadful in
variable-width fonts -- they'd need to strip out the extra space and do
it correctly. (Actually, IMO, it looks fairly dreadful in fixed width
fonts, too).

(Of course, if this is the worst problem we have with Debian package
descriptions, I say flip a coin and forget about it.)

Steve

-- 
Steve Greenland

    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net