Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbinga | Hacker News Reader

"One space" has no meaning in the finished TeX document. Space is a variable quantity. When using English typographical rules, the amount of space between sentences is larger than the amount of space between words, but both are variable.

In the TeX source code, you can put as many spaces you want between words and sentences, TeX does not mind and will produce the exact same result.

So in the context of TeX documents, "One space is correct and nothing else" is either meaningless or false.

View on HN

Because TeX corrects your mistakes. Not for any other reason.

One space is correct. It's so correct, TeX will even automatically strip spaces away if you make more than one. (Happens on the web, too, by the way.)

So how do you tell TeX where the ends of sentences are? I rather like the simple interface that is 'press space bar twice'. Do I have to put something on abbreviations instead?

TeX considers a period to be the end of a sentence unless it's preceded by a capital letter (in which case it assumes it's an initial or part of an acronym).

For abbreviations, you should explicitly insert a space control sequence (\<space>) or a non-breaking space (~) after the period.

TeX has a rather unintuitive trick for this. If you have a period immediately after a word followed by whitespace, it is taken to mark the end of a sentence. In order to indicate that a period does not end a sentence, you prefix the space by \@, for example, in `Cf.\@ Something`.

Just in case that sounds too simple, there is an exception for initials: `P. G. Wodehouse` is treated the same as `P.\@ G.\@ Wodehouse`. If you want to cancel this, prefix the period by `\@`.

This kind of thing makes Latex a hard sell to a general audience.

See http://latex-alive.tumblr.com/post/827168808/correct-punctua...

AFAIK TeX (in English language mode) puts a bit more space between sentences than between words. You can get the continental European style of equal spaces with the command \frenchspacing.

> TeX does not mind and will produce the exact same result.

I think if you think about it, you'll realize this is just TeX agreeing with what he said about one space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com