Hi András 2011/8/19 András Major <andras.g.ma...@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