Re: two spaces after sentence + other doc janitorial duties

[<dsmich@roadrunner.com>]

---- Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> wrote: 
> Heya Ludovic,
> 
> On Fri 02 Jul 2010 14:23, ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> 
> > Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:
> >
> >> On Fri 25 Jun 2010 18:35, Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org> writes:
> >>
> >>> Normally, texinfo source should have two spaces after each sentence:
> >>>
> >>>    Blah the first. Blah more.      ;; only one space, not cool
> >>>    Blah the first.  Blah more.     ;; two spaces, ok
> >>
> >> Why is this the case? TeX itself gets this right, why can't makeinfo?
> >
> > I’m not sure whether/how TeX gets it right.
> 
> For TeX, the end of a sentence comes when a terminal punctuation mark
> (e.g., `.' or `!') is followed by any amount of whitespace, and not
> preceded by a capital letter. For example the period after the T in
> "I.T. Department" does not end the sentence.
> 
> You do have to play tricks with TeX when you're doing something that
> doesn't conform to its expectations; see "Inserting Space" in the
> texinfo manual.
> 
> But since you have to placate TeX already, for print output, it seems
> the one-space or two-space shenanigans are completely redundant, and
> provide no new information. Info output is already reflowed in
> paragraphs, I don't see why its textual rendering doesn't follow TeX's
> rules rather than introducing its own redundancies on top of it.

I think it's because the original texinfo -> info formatter was in emacs-lisp,
and wasn't smart enough to DTRT.  I'm not sure if the makeinfo command is smart
enough.

-Dale