Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 4/4] gitfaq: fetching and pulling a repository

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 May 2020 18:03:26 -0700

Elijah Newren <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Also, a nit but, we are supposed to use 1 SP or 2 SP after a full
>> stop(.)? In India we use 1 SP, is it different in other countries?
>
> Ah, the never ending spacing debate...
>
> There may be variation country-to-country, but I doubt it's country
> specific.  It's more a raging debate based on the fact that "official"
> rules have changed multiple times, old habits die hard, different
> contexts exist for different audiences, and various other wrinkles.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170 ;-)

Since very old days of print media until now and well into the
future, readers want to see longer whitespace after the end of each
sentence than whitespace between words.  Behaviour of programs that
that take your "text file" as its input and produces rendered output
differ.  Some ignore the number of spaces after the full-stop and
"do the right thing" its output (that's the norm for typesetting
systems), and others want to see only one space there, and leaves
more swhitespace than optimal if you put two or more (which is often
how WYSIWYG word processors work).

The ideal would be to keep both the source text file and rendered
output pleasant to the eyes, and that means we type two spaces after
the end of a sentence in the source (which is meant to be read in
monospace text) and we avoid formatting programs that break (i.e.
produce more spaces than desirable) when fed more than one space
after each sentence (otherwise, we would be forced to use only one
space and hurt our eyes).

I think our arrangement to go from source text through AsciiDoc or
Asciidoctor to manpage or XHTML produces the right output with two
spaces, so we are good.