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Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a native U.K. person that went to school in the seventies (ie long before spell checkers), I can assure you that British English used S rather than Z in the kind of words you are talking about.
Part of the point being made was that British English did not . People put about the myth that this was a British/American thing, when it really was not. It's a French/Greek thing. British English incorporates both .
This may not seem like a big deal, but consider the effect that such an influential source of “correctness” can have on the general sense of what is correct. Spell checkers like Word’s are responsible for the “z” in British English being demonised. Once upon a time, according to linguist Gretchen McCullen, it was common in British English to use both z and s. But somewhere along the line, automated spell checkers cat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the point being made was that British English did not . People put about the myth that this was a British/American thing, when it really was not. It's a French/Greek thing. British English incorporates both .
--edit!!
It's not a confusion, moreover. It's two alternative forms, one with its roots in the French influence on the language, one with its roots in the Greek. British English incorporates both, as I said.
Where did people learn to double space? I've never had anyone even mention such a thing in school.
This may not seem like a big deal, but consider the effect that such an influential source of “correctness” can have on the general sense of what is correct. Spell checkers like Word’s are responsible for the “z” in British English being demonised. Once upon a time, according to linguist Gretchen McCullen, it was common in British English to use both z and s. But somewhere along the line, automated spell checkers cat…
-ize Vs -ize was a plot point in a 1987 episode of Inspector Morse: https://jeremybutterfield.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/ise-or-iz...
People have strong opinions on either side of this issue. I grew up with two spaces so anything else doesn't look correct. I did however get past indented spacing on paragraphs pretty quickly and that's mostly gone away. Thankfully book publishers still use them so they're not going away any time soon. Sure hope that Word has a way of toggling it off.
The whole debate over one space vs. two is just stupid. TeX got it right 40 years ago, recognising that it's no longer necessary to constrain ourselves to a integral number of space characters (a holdover from the typewriter era), but instead to use what it calls "glue" as separators between characters, words, and sentences. Glue between words is given a higher weighting than that between characters. Glue between sen…
So I think it doesn't quite miss the point. the point is that you want one ASCII space after a period and then you want the layout algorithm to do something intelligent (like make it as wide as two spaces or 1.5 spaces). This is why "1 space" is correct and two spaces conflates different layers of document creation (the textual information to display and how it is laid out).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so for the default mode in LaTeX. It tries to guess which periods indicate end-of-sentence (based on whether the next letter is capitalized) and will add additional horizontal space accordingly, unless you tell it not to by declaring your document uses “French Spacing”. (Edit: and my memory may be serving me incorrectly here, but I recall 20 years ago having a support package that also detected double-space in th…
Won’t that mess up titles like Dr. Livingstone and Mr. President? Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.
Prof.\@ Crumb
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with all letter spacing, the size is determined by the font metrics. There doesn't need to be a special character for it.
Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below? Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.
The whole debate over one space vs. two is just stupid. TeX got it right 40 years ago, recognising that it's no longer necessary to constrain ourselves to a integral number of space characters (a holdover from the typewriter era), but instead to use what it calls "glue" as separators between characters, words, and sentences. Glue between words is given a higher weighting than that between characters. Glue between sen…
Minor quibble: having a non-integral “number” of spaces was not a TeX innovation; Knuth was just reproducing standard practice of fine typography. Using variable-width separators (TeX “glue”) is exactly how human typesetters did it for centuries. So it's not quite the right perspective to consider anything “a holdover from the typewriter era”, because that had never been typographical practice in the first place — in…
We had a really long period of time where printed material was produced by professional typesetters, followed by a much shorter period where people started producing documents using typewriters and computers with software that worked with fixed-width characters. Then with with TeX, proportionally spaced fonts, and the desktop publishing revolution we got that ability back.
For some reason there are a lot of people thinking in terms of typewriters and 1980s-era word processors when talking about sentence spacing, which seems quite odd.