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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

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 the source as another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard extension.)

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Won’t that mess up titles like Dr. Livingstone and Mr. President?

Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

Yup:

  Prof.\@ Crumb

...is the behavior suppressor.

I usually force a narrow space after titles: Dr.\,Livingstone

> Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

It would be a lot less hard if we were able to unambiguously tell the computer whether a period ends a sentence. I wonder how we could possibly do that...

(Less sarcastically: a lot of Unix programs - Emacs, vim, troff, etc. - solve this problem by defaulting to double-spaced sentences, thus resolving the ambiguity. Kinda odd that this ain't the Tex approach; there's already precedent by using doubled-up ``backquotes'' and ``single quotes'' to produce “smart double quotes”, and lone `backquotes' and `single quotes' similarly become ‘smart single quotes’.)

I remember reading the TeXbook and learning that the space after a period is wider if there's a capital afterwards and the various ways of suppressing this behavior.

So it's a TeX thing, not LaTeX.

Thanks. I appreciate the attention to detail! FWIW, the distinction between the two is blurry given that most people I’ve known in academia never use TeX directly other then through LaTeX.

To be clear, it’s both.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2024338/latex-sometimes-...

LaTeX is based on TeX

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