Re: unwrapa and space after period

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

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