Re: Wishlist: LaTeX export: automatically append backslash to "." unless at end of sentence

[William Henney <whenney@gmail.com>]

Hi András

2011/8/19 András Major <andras.g.major@gmail.com>:
>> > There is always a longer space between sentences than after a "."
>> > that doesn't mark the end of a sentence
>>
>> This could easily be turned off with the use of a single \frenchspacing
>> in the preamble (or in the document; you may switch between the two in
>> the document as often as you like; e.g. \frenchspacing is active
>> starting from the point TeX reads the macro until it is set back to
>> \nonfrenchspacing).
>
> I'm fully aware of that, but that also messes up the spacing between
> sentences.  My proposed solution should be robust enough to be
> more-or-less foolproof yet produce nice-looking output.
>

What is nice-looking is a matter of personal taste. Personally, I tend
to prefer everything close-set, as with \frenchspacing, although that
is mainly because it is very easy to screw up with LaTeX's default
spacing, and then things look terrible. There is an interesting
discussion at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sentence_spacing

If you _do_ want to keep the wider inter-sentence spacing, then you
also need to worry about sentences that end with upper-case letters.
For instance, in LaTeX you should write:

"The paper by A. Major et~al.\ was discussed by the General Assembly
of the UN\@."

Without the "\@" LaTeX would not recognize the period following "UN"
to be sentence-ending. Note that there is no need to do anything
special after the "A."

If you are going to go this way, I think it should be optional. Not
everyone uses double spaces between sentences in their ascii text.

Cheers

Will

-- 

  Dr William Henney, Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica,
  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Campus Morelia