On 12/19/20, Dorai Sitaram <ds26...@yahoo.com> wrote: > groff pretty much forces one to use two spaces after sentence-ending > punctuation, unless it's at the end of a source line. Is there a way to > avoid this, so that the space is uniform regardless of whether the ending > punctuation occurs mid- or end-line?
Using 0 as the second parameter of the .ss request results in the same space being put between words and between sentences. > (I could resign myself to always type > 2 spaces after every sentence, but convention has moved away from this type > of unergonomic typing, and it's difficult to do it just for groff.) I'd turn this around, and ask what other applications misbehave if you type two spaces between sentences? I type that way across the board with no noticeable down side. Developing the habit of typing everything with two spaces between sentences aids the writing process, because it's easy to do searches to find sentence boundaries (and some text editors have keystrokes that recognizes such sentence boundaries automatically). If your final copy requires that sentences be separated by only one space, it's easy to squeeze out the extra space with a simple search and replace (whereas the opposite is impossible to do with an algorithm, because so many different punctuation combinations can end sentences, and algorithms can't always distinguish between a period ending a sentence and a period indicating an abbreviation). But you'll probably find that leaving the extra spaces in doesn't cause any problems, no matter what the application is. Anything displayed in HTML will squeeze it out anyway on display. Other applications will show it, but what is the down side to that? In informal contexts such as email and online chat tools, there almost certainly is none. In material that needs to be typeset to modern convention, where sentences don't get extra space, whatever typesetter you're using will almost certainly handle this.
