Quoting Ron (ron@debian.org): > > Remove double spaces (we try to recommend the use of single spaces > > after sentence dots). > > hmmm. I didn't raise this on the list, because I presume its been > debated already and a style decision made, but this goes against > my most primal education on english writing. It's so base I don't > even recall who instilled it in me, but it was definitely part of > 'standard early education' here... > > I don't really care enough to argue over it, but I do find two > spaces more readable (and do regret that things like html renderers > compress them by default). I'd be curious to hear the arguments > for preferring a single space in english though. > > I'm not really convinced the few bytes we'd save are worth the cost > to readability. Is there some better reason for doing this? My personal argument is that the typoraphy IIRC recommends such space to be 1.5em. Using two characters is indeed a "trick" to respect this. It seems to be widely used in USA. I'm not sure about UK and its former colonies that are not USA. I think that this should be left to the rendering mechanisms rather than tricking them with extra characters. We also have to deal with the fact that many non native speakers do not have that convention in their language (IIRC, this is something really specific to English) even if the typographical rules are nearly the same. Given that the English flavor we use is shared internationnally, I personnally pushed for abandoning that trick just the same way we finally choosed(?) to use US-style spelling which is a nightmare for my fellow co-workers as most of them originate from the UK... Generally, we leave the final decision to maintainers if they insist on using double spaces.
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