atw: Re: Extra spacing after full stop
- From: rhardman <zut@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:55:45 +0100
* À 20080118-1556_Fri, O'Connor, Deirdre [Beacon Technology]
(DeirdreOConnor@xxxxxxxxxxx) écrivit:
> Can anyone provide a yes/no answer to the question of whether extra
> spacing between sentences should/shouldn't be used in
> Manual/Guideline/Standard type documentation? I find many professionals
For what it's worth, in UNIXworld where most of our
developers started life, programs which parse text use (something like)
the following definitions:
Paragraph - A string of characters ending with the ascii
characters "period 'carriage return' linefeed".
Sentence - A string of characters ending with the ascii
characters "period space space".
So, at least in in UNIXworld, that is the origin of the
double space after a full stop. One would have a snowball's hope in
hell to change this convention. Indeed, reading a page of text in a
monospaced font, developers are accustomed to mentally parse
out the sentences from the visual clue given by the double space
between them.
This is clearly irrelevant for text in proportionally spaced
fonts. The developers' friend for producing such text is the
typesetter and formatter LaTeX (from TeX), which is usually
set up to replace "period space space" with "period space" from the
source text file. It should be easy for the tech writer to do this
automatically, even in MS Word, and so leave us all at peace.
--
Reginald HARDMAN
Rédacteur technique - Technical writer
Paris, France
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