Re: Lack of tooling slowing down contributions

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2019-06-17, at 01:06, Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz> wrote:

> On 2019-06-17 07:20, Juri Linkov wrote:
>>>> It would also be nice that tooling within Emacs helps contributors
>>>> get
>>>> their contributions right. For example, I would expect M-q to add the
>>>> double-spacing at the end of sentences.
>>>
>>> If you have set sentence-end-double-space to t, then text like
>>>
>>> foo bar.
>>> etc etc.
>>>
>>> Will be refilled by M-q with double spaces. But if you write
>>>
>>> foo bar. etc etc.
>>>
>>> I.e, using single spacing, then M-q won't change that, because Emacs
>>> doesn't recognize that as being two separate sentences.
>>
>> This feature is sorely missed: every time I copy text from web browsers
>> to Emacs I have to manually insert additional space at the end of every
>> copied sentence before typing M-q.
>
>
> You can't do this automatically, can you?  One of the reasons that the
> double-spaced sentence convention is useful in the first place is that
> it unambiguously differentiates sentence endings from other uses of that
> punctuation character which do *not* indicate the end of a sentence.
>
> E.g. for example, should not become "E.g.  for example".
>
> P. G. Wodehouse should not end up as "P.  G.  Wodehouse".
>
> Prof. Moriarty should not end up as "Prof.  Moriarty"
>
> When the same punctuation character is used for multiple things, I don't
> imagine there's any way for Emacs to do this accurately, short of
> natural-
> language parsing (which sounds like a giant can of worms) ?
>
>
> -Phil

TeX uses a nice approximate solution where a period after a capital
letter does not mean a sentence ending.  This does not solve everything
(of course), but helps in cases like "P. G. Wodehouse" (I love his
Bertram Wooster stories, btw).  On the other hand, it can be tripped by
things like "He used to work in NASA.  Now he's a full-time comic strip
author".

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl