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When the question boils down to who shall be the masters, the
educationists or the Compugraphic typesetting machines, I, for one, would stick
with the educationists. Even as I approach retirement age, it is much
easier to read printed material with a double space between sentences. And
since (as a litigating attorney) a judge or law clerk's comprehension of what I
have written is usually advantageous, double space between sentences and no
right margin justification give me a winning edge (and do not materially
affect any limitations on pages or word counts.
Fred
----- Original Message -----
Subject: Re: unwrapa and space after
period
Robert mentions in his post that unwrapa "does intelligent
spacing,
replacing a with one space if it follows an
alphanumeric, and two
spaces if it follows an appropriate punctuation mark
like a period or
question mark." Unfortunately, since about 1965,
typography has moved
away from the double space after periods and
question marks, even when
they end sentences. (Some ill-informed people are
trying to say that the
double space was never anything but a typewriter
expedient, like
underlining for italics, but that simply isn't so: one
learned to double
space after a period in Typing 101 back in the 50s
because that was how
type was set back then.) I don't like it;
educationists didn't like it
when it first came in, on the grounds that the
extra space helped
children grasp the unity of the sentence. (Educationists
nowadays don't
know what a sentence is.) But that's the way type is set
nowadays. (In
the 80s, I worked on a Compugraphic typesetter that beeped
and locked up
if you tried to type an extra space after a period.) So
Robert might want
to remove that feature. If anyone is interested in the
whole story, I
have an essay on it that I could probably dig up and
forward.
Patricia
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