On Wednesday 28 April 2004 06:57 am, Mardigrafe - Louis Desjardins wrote: > Hi everybody, > > I was reading the discussion over bug 424 about the extra > space and I'd like to add a little comment. > > It is suggested that Scribus could take care of the > double spaces at the end of a sentence, like other > languages such as LaTex and HTML do (that is, the extra > space is automatically deleted). It is of course very > common to put 2 spaces at the end of a sentence. Many > people just don't know that typography in general doesn't > like those extra spaces! This is why professionnals rely > on utilities to get rid of all those spaces that can > affect the overall quality of typography.
Two spaces is an old typewriter convention. And books published before about 1930 usually put extra space after all punctuation marks for readability. I think this got changed to save pages, and now the new standard is a normal wordspace. I still like to fudge a bit (in TeX) and leave small amounts of extra space after commas and more after end-of-sentence marks like periods and exclamation points. See my correspondence on this subject on comp.text.tex and the helpful reply furnished by Etienne Riga. The thread is titled "Re: Frenchspacing" and Etienne's reply is dated Sep 8, 2003. This kind of refinement is probably beyond Scribus as presently conceived. But Scribus could take a page out of the InDesign program and copy the TeX paragraph formatting routines in their entirety. They are legally copyable. TeX is written in a language called Web so the routines would need to be transliterated into whatever Scribus is written in (C++?) This would be a big undertaking but with big payoff. -- John Culleton Able Typesetters and Indexers http://wexfordpress.com
