On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 22:07:02 -0500 Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com> wrote:
> In my tinkering way I have made a script that > gives you two possibilities, changing a double > space to an em space, or to a single space. > > http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Double2emspace.py > > As you can see at the bottom of the wiki page, > I didn't really like the end result of an em > space between sentences, but perhaps there > might be some nostalgic use someone might have > for this. > > Greg > > > > _______________________________________________________ > Unlimited Disk, Data Transfer, PHP/MySQL Domain > Hosting http://www.doteasy.com A little history. Books published prior to about 1930 in the USA used a little extra space after comma etc. and more after a full stop. I have a book published in 1907 where the extra spacing is clearly visible. When the typewriter came along the instructions were to put two space characters after a full stop to emulate this practice. In the 1930's the extra spacing was removed by publishers, presumably hoping to save pages. At that time setting two spaces at the end of a full stop was deprecated as being "typewriter spacing." When TeX was created in about 1971 or thereabouts the default spacing was a small extra amount after comma, a little more after colon and semicolon and two full ems after a full stop like period, question mark. To disable this one inserts the command \frenchspacing There are two macros in plain TeX and indeed in all other TeX formats that define \frenchspacing and \nonfrenchspacing. One can redefine one of the macros to set more reasonable values for a particular book. I happen to prefer some extra space after a punctuation mark, e.g. after a full stop but not the two full spaces (roughly) that are the default in TeX. In my view extra space increases readability, I can't use too much space however because some purist will scream "typewriter spacing." And of course Europeans can always use the unaltered version of \frenchspacing. The command that defines the width of each letter is \sfcode. The default \sfcode for lower case letters and punctuation is e.g., \sfcode'a=1000 The macros are on page 351 of "The TeXBook" for the curious. What is the effect on Scribus? By default it uses the equivalent of \frenchspacing. I don't propose to change that in my books. But for long text only books I use TeX anyhow. Scribus is a different animal. John Culleton Wexford Press Free list of books for self-publishers: http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html PDF e-book: "Create Book Covers with Scribus" available at http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html
