Re: ot -- Re: Full-screen editor in /bin

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Paul M Foster <paulf@quillandmouse.com> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 02:43:01PM +0200, Stein A Stromme wrote:
> 
> > [benfoley@rcn.com]
> > 
> > | yeah, but much less jovial. don't take it personally. i try to
> > | compensate with well-considered punctuation. you'll get used to
> > | it. i have.

Why make it harder on your audience, though?

And whether the exclusive use of lowercase letters makes your postings
appear jovial or less-than-fully-educated is also in the eye of the
reader.  (Not, I hasten to add, that I'm claiming that you are, in fact,
not very well educated or unintelligent.  Some people may draw that
conclusion from your posts, however.)

> > Double space after sentence-ending periods would be even more
> > well-considered.
> 
> Double-spacing is a holdover from typing classes (and I'm not sure why
> we did it even then). Nowadays, there's no need for it.

We did it (and some of us still do it) because it makes large blocks of
text in a monospaced font easier to read.  Several programs have been
built around this; in particular, emacs requires a double space for its
forward-sentence, backward-sentence, and kill-sentence operations to
work correctly.  (Didn't this used to be a thread about editors, once?)

If you're working with a proportionally-spaced font, as in most word
processors, then many people do say that the extra space is not required.
However, as in most things typographical, I tend to turn to TeX for
guidance.  By default, it places a little extra space at the end of each
sentence.  It is typically less than twice the inter-word space, but it
depends on how much the glue on the line has to be stretched in order to
fit the page.

Richard