Anyway, a pet peeve of mine is not displaying two spaces after the end of a sentence. Two spaces makes it so much more readable. (IIRC, LyX, KLyX, and Latex do the same thing.)

A similar pet peeve is wiki's (or browser's) control of vertical (and horizontal) whitespace. There are times when I'd like to add arbitrary whitespace for clarity. (I'll have to check -- I imagine it might work with the pre or verbatim tags, which helps but doesn't address the entire problem.)

Anyway, I wonder who I have to straighten out, the Internet powers that be, Microsoft, all wikis, or just TWiki?

PS: I wonder if we need a "p_ss_ng in the wind" (or "tilting at windmills") TopicClassification?

-- RandyKramer - 12 Jun 2001

I did a quick Google search and turned up the following - http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html - seems like it is mainly the browsers, but apparently with proportional fonts the use of one space only is not such an issue. However, there are arguments on both sides - there are lots more links at http://www.google.com/search?q=sentence+two+spaces, and this is clearly somewhat of a religious issue. Fortunately, you only have to fix all the browsers, so it's not too hard

Having said that, TWiki makes this sort of change relatively easy. Just put some code in DefaultPlugin or the wikicfg.pm equivalent that implements the two spaces model - something like this might be a start (not tested in TWiki, though it works fine with perl -p -e, and would need to only run outside PRE/VERBATIM type blocks):

    $_[0] =~ s/\. +/.  /g;

Of course, this code won't work for abbreviations not at the end of a sentence (e.g. 'U.S. Government' - two examples...), so you might want to just type two spaces after each sentence and have TWiki convert those to   entities so the browser renders it the way you want.

If you want to pick on typographical issues with TWiki, it might also be good to address the need for spaces after an InterWikis link such as Wiki:InterWiki !

-- RichardDonkin - 12 Jun 2001

Richard,

Thanks, the Perl snippet should be helpful -- when I learn a little Perl I might actually try to implement it! (And, I didn't think about using two non-breaking spaces. I think I already see how to expand it to deal with ? and !. (Hmmm, maybe I already know a little Perl.))

Not sure I understand your point about interwiki links -- are you saying that TWiki deletes them, or that TWiki should automatically insert one (or more?)?

PS: The link is very interesting. I still set IE to use courier even for the variable width font -- in Word I like Arial but it doesn't seem to render as well in IE (or maybe it's a different Arial).

-- RandyKramer - 13 Jun 2001

The InterwikiPlugin code did get upset if there was anything except a space following the Interwiki link, but this is now fixed.

As for Arial, it would be the same in IE and Word, but IE may render differently.

-- RichardDonkin - 13 Jun 2001