Re: Spaces after periods (was: Documenting NEWS features for 25.1)

[Nikolai Weibull <now@disu.se>]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 6:05 PM, John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> +with the Greek lambda character @samp{λ}. In a TeX buffer, it will
>>                                            ^^     ^^^
>> Two spaces between sentences, please (we use the US English
>> conventions).
>
> I almost hate to say this, but I'm not sure this is the English convention
> anymore. A quick Google shows many, many sites that indicate that the modern
> convention is now one space, and none that recommend two spaces. I've even
> changed to one space in my e-mails, even, after being a long holdout for the
> two space rule.

I haven’t seen a style guide that says anything other than that one
space is preferred.  However, I thought the general rule was to use
two spaces to make it easy for software (oh, the continued irony of it
all) to distinguish sentence-ending periods from other periods.

Also, any typesetting software that doesn’t fold multiple spaces into
one isn’t a typesetting software.  Microsoft Word isn’t a typesetting
software.  TeX is a typesetting software, so using multiple spaces
shouldn’t affect the output at all.  (Perhaps Texinfo is different?)
Though, TeX, as far as I recall, favors adding space after a period
when justifying a paragraph.