Thanks, Peter. You are right about (Plain) TeX--I just got into the habit of inserting them. Defining my own macro to reproduce the control space is a possibility, and I will do that IF the current behavior of “.\ ’ and the tilde in MKII is not remedied. (I have not switched to MKIV yet, but wonder what happens there.) The downside is that there is a good number of documents that will require have to be encoded accordingly. Cheers, Alan On Jul 18, 2008, at 14;40,39 , Peter Rolf wrote:
Alan Bowen schrieb:
My original query has generated some interesting sidelines but no solution, at least none that I can see. So, with all due apologies, I shall presume on your patience by restating my query.
In (English) typography the spacing after a period within a sentence is less that that after a period at the end of a sentence. Since the days of Plain TeX, one achieved the proper spacing after an intra- sentence period by entering “.\<space>”. My problem is that this no longer seems to work with recent versions of ConTeXt/MKII: “. \<space>” does not seem to have any effect at all.
are you sure of that?
a citation from "The TeXbook", chapter 12: Glue
"Another way to get TeX to put out a normal space is to type '\ ' (control space); e.g., 'Mr.\ Drofnats' would be almost the same as 'Mr.~Drofnats', exept that a line might end after the 'Mr.'. "
also: you don't need a control space here
from the exercise 12.5:
"TeX doesn't consider a period or question mark or exclamation point to be the end of a sentence if the preceding character is an uppercase letter, since TeX assumes that such uppercase letters are most likely somebody's initials'. "
what you want is just a smaller skip. so how about a *local* use of something like
\def\ {\thinspace}%
donno if this is possible (side effects) in your environment. maybe one of the gurus can give an answer. anyhow, interesting stuff :)
best wishes, peter
So, how are we now to get the proper spacing after an intra-sentence period? Are there some language/spacing commands that need to be invoked in the prelims now?
Sample text: \starttext
A. E. Samuels and other scholars. The community of time{-}keepers.
A.\ E.\ Samuels and other scholars. The community of time{-}keepers.
\stoptext
Alan ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________