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French spacing is the 1999 It is not customary in languages other than English (including French). PREFERENCES AND STYLE GUIDES Some authors consider that text using "French spacing" looks better than text written with only one space after a full stop; others think that , HTML , XML ), whereas others encourage it (most notably TeX and LaTeX ). ORIGINS OF THE TERM The term may be derived from the difficulty of adding double-spaces to text that is typeset using a Hot Metal Linotype Machine . Spaces were added to the text using Wedges , which automatically fully Justified the text, but two normal wedges together introduced problems. A Workaround using an En space followed by a thin justifier-space was thought to be "fancy" (or "French") and cost extra. COMPUTER SOFTWARE Text editors Some computer text editors, such as Emacs and Vi , originally relied on French spacing to recognize sentence boundaries. By default, Emacs will not break a line at a single space preceded by a period, but this behaviour is configurable (with the variable sentence-end-double-space). There are also functions to move the cursor an entire sentence forward or backward. The GNU Coding Standards still recommend using two spaces, to accommodate the default behavior of Emacs. GNU Coding Standards §5.2 Commenting your work With all modern editors and word processors, a global 'replace' operation easily converts French spacing to single spacing. However, the reverse operation is not as simple, because spaces that follow abbreviations would be expanded incorrectly. HTML Web Browser s follow the HTML specification and ignore runs of White Space when displaying them. W3C - HTML 4.01: Paragraphs, Lines and Phrases In order to force a web browser to display such spacing, a character sequence such as    for an en-space followed by a thin space, or   for an em-space) can be used. W3C - HTML 4.01: Character entity references in HTML 4 TeX The typesetting software TeX by Donald Knuth also treats runs of whitespace as a single space, but uses a Heuristic to recognize sentence endings and then typesets these by default using additional "French spacing". However, Knuth uses the term "French spacing" for the Continental practice of using a single space after sentences, because he named the TeX macro to deactivate the automatic enlarging of space after the end of a sentence renchspacing, whereas the U.S.-style default setting can be reactivated with onfrenchspacing. FRENCH TYPOGRAPHY See Also: Punctuation in French Real French typographyLexique des règles typographiques en usage à l’Imprimerie nationale, 3ème édition, Imprimerie nationale, 1993 differs from English practice primarily by placing a single no-break space before a Semicolon , Colon , Question or Exclamation Mark , in addition to the normal space after these punctuations. This French practice of typography has occasionally also been applied to English texts, and this is also referred to as French spacing. For example, the photographic reprint of E. H. Carr 's '' The Twenty Years' Crisis '' (Harper Collins Perennial, 2001) has unusually wide spacing not only after periods, but also after colons and Semicolon s; and in line with French typographic practice, it has also spaces before the latter two marks as well. Quotation Mark s, though they are doubled as in U.S. practice, also have a series of adjustments deriving from French typographical style. For every passage enclosed by the marks, a space follows the opening set of quotation marks, and one usually also precedes the closing set, unless the original text ends in a period, question mark, or exclamation point. If there is not one of these three stops or a comma between the closing quotation mark and a superscripted reference number for a footnote, a space is added to separate them. SEE ALSO
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