Re: Typo in an IPv6 address in USEPRO

"Charles Lindsey" <[email protected]> writes:

> I dislike the comvention of using double spaces between sentences, but
> it is hard-coded into nroff (which regularly gets it wrong in edge cases
> such as this one).

I'm completely anal about using two spaces between periods partly because
I personally find it more readable and partly because it was how I was
taught when I first began writing things on-line.  There are flaws in both
the single-space and the double-space compromises in representing
typographic sentence-separating m-space in a fixed-width medium, but I
think two spaces is clearer in a traditional fixed-width rendering and
fairly closely approximates a real m-space when (as is increasingly
common) rendered in a proportional font.

It's one of those things that I don't mention with other documents, but
that I tend to force on anything for which I'm a primary author.

Of course, if viewed in HTML, HTML rips away all repeated whitespace
anyway and it doesn't matter.  It's probably a sign of the strength of
habit that I double-space sentence boundaries even in things I write
solely to render into HTML.

> There is no way you can write nroff source to force any particular case
> to be exactly as you want it (same as some examples you spoted in
> son-of-1036).

Yes, you need the markup capabilities provided by a full formatting
language such as TeX to get this right, which include the ability to tag
specific periods as either sentence-ending or not sentence-ending.
Neither *roff nor the XML syntax used by xml2rfc are quite up to the job,
unfortunately (nor is HTML).

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>