Language and English

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Fri Jan 4 19:35:44 2002

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> From: "Christopher Smith" <csmith_at_amdocs.com>
> > > From: Hans Franke [mailto:Hans.Franke_at_mch20.sbs.de]
> >
> > > Thank you very much. So it seams there is a 'school' forcing this in
> > > the US ... and I always wondered why some people add two spaces after
> > > a period. There's even a very old 'text beautifier' for DOS which
> > > inserted these (for my eyes) stupid spaces. Well, I guess CC is not
> > > only the hardware :=)
> >
> > I think that it's supposed to help the eye differentiate between space
> > between words and space between sentences.
>
> If the period took up as much space as another character, that would
> be true, but with mail readers that perform kerning as though they
> were trying to prepare text for publication, the period gets
> short-schrift, so to speak, and often is nearly invisible.

I think this is mostly the by-product of GUI based mail readers and
operating systems. I still use console/text based mail readers like pine
and elm since they make text much easier to read when compared to the
latest GUI mail readers.

-Toth
Received on Fri Jan 04 2002 - 19:35:44 GMT