Re: [Docutils-develop] Re: [Doc-SIG] Idea: make double-space between sentences meaningful

[Mark N. <Mar...@fr...>]

Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> 
> David Goodger wrote:
> > Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> >  > There already exists an obvious convention supported by programs
> >  > (e.g. Emacs) for representing it in plain text: just use a double
> >  > space after the end of a sentence.  I propose to make this official
> >  > for reStructuredText: more than one space between words after
> >  > punctuation [2]_ signifies a sentence end [3]_.
> >
> > It seems to me that Docutils and reStructuredText already support this
> > standard, simply by not messing with whitespace unduly.  I don't see
> > how making this "official" would benefit users of reStructuredText.
> > Do we want the reST parser to be in the business of guessing sentence
> > endings?
> >
> It supports it in the sense that the parser and writers pass the
> whitespace untouched.  But it's not visible in HTML or LaTeX to the
> end-user because both normalize whitespace.  What I propose is for the
> writers to explicitly emit whitespace in a way that won't be ignored.
> 
> I don't think it should be used for anything but single/double .

I'm not sure that anything internally needs to change, but I agree
that the latex writer should have an option (probably on by default)
to output "\ " after any period that is followed by a single space.
That way it could handle things like ::

  Beni et al. report that it should not be used for anything
  but single/double.  Anything beyond that is not meaningful.

to produce ::

  Beni et al.\ report that it should not be used for anything
  but single/double.  Anything beyond that is not meaningful.

Unfortunately, there's still a problem if the "et al." occurs at the
end of a line, but the heuristic is still an improvement, IMO.

	--Mark