David B Harris wrote: > Also, in the description template, two spaces are used after a period - > is that standard nowadays? (My understanding was that they were > primarily used for variable-width fonts, where a single space would take > up very little page space.
There was an interesting discussion about this in debian-user a few months back, with inconclusive results. People who learned to type on mechanical typewriters with fixed-width fonts generally were taught to use two spaces between sentences (and perhaps after colons as well). So to say that two spaces "were primarily used for variable-width fonts" is historically wrong; if anything, they were, and are, more commonly used with fixed-width fonts. Technical writing teachers usually go out of their way to get their students to unlearn the two-spaces rule, and use only one space. I do not know whether this is related to the fact that most documents produced by technical writers are typeset with variable-width fonts. During the debian-user thread on this subject, I did a quick survey of several professionally-typeset books that were near at hand at the time. IIRC, I found that about 70-80% of them did not use extra space between sentences. This seems like enough to show that the general bias in typesetting is to use a single space between sentences, but it also shows that it's not an absolute. As you can see from this message, I have completely given up on two spaces, and always put only one space between sentences. I originally learned to type on a typewriter, and was told to use two spaces; I did this religiously until I did some technical writing and was told by the other tech writers on staff to use only one space. I then observed that my documents looked better without the extra space leaving ugly holes in my paragraphs, and that most books and magazines didn't have the extra space. I have been a single-space writer ever since. > Since the descriptions should be presented in > a fixed-width font (for many reasons, this also includes GUI package > browsers), they're a bit redundant.) I don't see any reason why package descriptions shouldn't be presented in variable-width fonts. The right margin might look a bit ragged (assuming the program preserves line breaks, which is probably a good idea to avoid messing up bulletted lists in the description), but so what? Package descriptions don't usually include tabular data that would be seriously messed up by variable-width fonts. Craig
