* 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 ========================================= ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************