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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 3, 2020, 01:03 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqftchkext.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <CABPp-BGrsw1V3gUWN40DTRCPBD5ZD5kvoqdjMuEJtJKCni09_w@mail.gmail.com>

Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

>> 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.