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Re: Doc: NR - Doc CSS colour support (issue 551270043 by address@hidden)


From: dak
Subject: Re: Doc: NR - Doc CSS colour support (issue 551270043 by address@hidden)
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 16:45:05 -0800

On 2019/12/20 00:01:59, lemzwerg wrote:
> > There should always a comma after 'i.e.', as far as I know.
>
> Nope.  It's grammatical dogma (in the same vein as not
> starting sentences with the words 'And' or 'Because).
> I think commas after these abbreviations look ugly.

I'm not a native speaker, but I think exactly the opposite, given that
'i.e.'
means 'that is' and 'e.g.' means 'for example'.

> > This is especially important for the PDFs since by default
> > `texinfo.tex` doesn't use frenchspacing, thus inserting a
> larger horizontal space after a full stop.
>
> So?  If it were that bad why are we using two spaces after
> a full point then?

I'm talking about the printed *output*.  Having two spaces in the
*input* files
is a convention to better support editors like Emacs who use those
spaces to
recognize sentence endings, allowing quick sentence-wise navigation.

> Which has nothing to do with grammar and would mean this would have
to be made
> policy (which it isn't) and fixed throughout the entire doc.

By default, texinfo follows the convention of inserting more
horizontal space
after a full stop in the printed output (both info and PDF).  Having
this
additional space looks extremely ugly if it is not the end of a
sentence (like
in abbreviations 'e.g.' or 'i.e.').  We have three possibilities to
fix this.

(1) Insert a comma after such abbreviations.  This is what I would do,
and I
already tried to handle that in a uniform way in a few previous
commits (at
least for the NR).  BTW, you might check whether the majority cases in
the docs
are either 'e.g.,' or 'e.g.'.
(2) Insert `@:` after a full stop that doesn't end a sentence.
(3) Insert the command `@frenchspacing on` in the preamble to disable
this
American typography feature.

We *must* do one of the three solutions.  Otherwise we get really ugly
output in
the info and PDF formats.

Chicago manual of style says:
<https://writingexplained.org/chicago-style/ie-and-eg>, namely use a
comma here.  The two-space after period rule for Emacs is not just for
sentence navigation but also for auto-fill-mode (and various other
commands) to refrain from creating a line wrap in the middle of an
abbreviation.

Whether or not we care about the grammatical dogma of the U.S. centric
Chicago Manual of Style, TeX (and in consequence Texinfo) have doctored
their input conventions around that.  TeX does not add sentence-end
space after a capital letter followed by a period, like Donald E. Knuth,
but has no such qualms after lowercase letters.  And for better or
worse, we do follow U.S. usage (like with spellings of color and center
rather than colour and centre) in the LilyPond documentation in general.

https://codereview.appspot.com/551270043/



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