[Doc-SIG] Re: Idea: make double-space between sentences meaningful

[Felix Wiemann]

Beni Cherniavsky wrote:

> Some formats (notably LaTeX) support the typographical convention (of
> some languages, e.g. English but not French IIRC) of putting a bigger
> space after the end of a sentence than between words.
>
> Currently, reST provides no way to convey this information to the
> output format.  Producing high-quality output requires this
> information.  There already exists an obvious convention supported by
> programs (e.g. Emacs) for representing it in plain text: just use a
> double space after the end of a sentence.  I propose to make this
> official for reStructuredText: more than one space between words after
> punctuation [2]_ signifies a sentence end [3]_.

Sounds good.  I'd like that very much.  IMO it can be added to
alternatives.txt or notes.txt (David, what d'you think?).

> It's a good bet that anybody who cares about it in his LaTeX output
> also cares about his source, but it's a good idea to make this a
> parser option (defaulting off?)...

It should be activated by default, because it doesn't hurt if it isn't
used.

> It is even possible, if desired, to support this in HTML output, using
> some hack (`` `` won't do because we *want* it to be breakable -
> it's even better there; perhaps ``<span class="sentence-end"> </span>``
> with appropriate CSS?).

No.  It's bloat, it's unnecessary, it's hackish.

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