Double space or single space

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

fre 2002-02-08 klockan 12.41 skrev Mark Levitt:
> > Ack, please don't go into the spaces debate here too!  I just read this
> 
> Sorry. But, I can't resist. Plus, the outcome of the debate on KDE doc was
> to use a single space. :)

Nevertheless, please change the topic. :)


> > you want to type in a character entity after every sentence (since
> > automatic determination of this is quite dificult).  Not to mention that
> > the character entity would probably end up being converted to a double
> > space for most output formats anyway.
> 
> No, you're missing the point. The layout engine doesn't need to do anything
> at all except specify a proportionally spaced font for the main body text. I
> don't think there are any output formats we care about that don't have the
> ability to render proportionally spaced fonts.
> 
> Go to a bookstore and pull any book of the shelf. I promise it will use a
> single space after a period.
> 
> Look at any professionally designed web site (http://www.linuxtoday.com,
> http://www.guardian.co.uk, http://news.bbc.co.uk, http://www.salon.com, etc)
> you'll find they use proportionally spaced fonts with a single space between
> sentences.

When I translate from English into Swedish, I always translate double
spaces to single spaces, since I cannot find any support for the double
space convention in Swedish. So this convention may be cultural too.

But it makes sense to treat this differently between monospace text and
proportional text. I'm interested in the outcome of this, since it
should affect the application interfaces too. Gtk+ usually renders with
a proportional font, but nevertheless authors use different styles when
writing messages with multiple sentences.


Christian