[Cryptography] MAybe he's Adam Back, maybe not

[Jerry Leichter]

> [Double space after period]
I do it, too - because I learned to touch-type back in the days of typewriters.

> There's a better reason to do this than "learned to touch-type", though
> mentioning it risks starting a flame war: it disambiguates sentence-
> ending periods from acronym periods.  IMO it's a very basic bit of
> markup/markdown that typesetting software should support by turning
> those double spaces into wide single spaces.
TeX does this by default.  (You don't even need to type two spaces - a space after a period that is after at least two successive letters does it.)  The effect is subtle because the inserted whitespace has a different "stretchability" than other inter-word whitespace.

It's been years since I thought about this stuff, so details are fuzzy and I'm too lazy to go find my copy of the TeXbook.

If I remember correctly, you would say \frenchspacing to tell it not to do that.
                                                        -- Jerry