[TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in
 <20201106225422.GD99027 at eureka.lemis.com>:
 |On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote:
 |>> I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors
 |>> used 2... who knows why? :).
 |>
 |> Typewriters.
 |>
 |> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
 |> we have "stretchy spaces" between words.  The space after end-of-
 |> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
 |> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
 |> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.
 |
 |FWIW, this is the US convention.  Other countries have different
 |conventions.  My Ausinfo style manual states
 |
 |  There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the
 |  end of a sentence.
 |
 |I believe that this also holds for Germany.  I'm not sure that the UK
 |didn't have different rules again.

Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the
punctuation characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question-
and exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace.  The
next word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step"). 
However, typewriters often place(d) those characters left in
a cell, so that the visual appearance is accordingly.

In novels around 66 characters is the recommendation i seem to
recall.  I have that in mails, 72 in other text modes, and 79 for
everything else.  (The latter lead to lots of ugly code once
i used tabulators, but different tabulator spacing would have
resulted in different look in $PAGER and $VISUAL, so ...)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)