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Seems implausible to me. As one of the replies indicates, most periods at the end of lines won’t follow a quote, so this solution doesn’t work there. Worse, it only applies to lines ending in a period. Those are extremely rare because hand-set lines typically ended with filler, in order to make all lines in a block of text equal length. See for example https://letterpresscommons.com/setting-type-by-hand/: “ As you are setting your line of type and finish the last word of the line, you’ll need to fill out the rest of your line with word spacing material” I also would think most exclamation marks would not be wider than periods and commas. Why, then, are those typically rendered outside closing quotation marks? https://faqs.cs.uu.nl/na-dir/alt-usage-english-faq.html says “According to William F. Phillips (wfp@world.std.com), in the days when printing used raised bits of metal, "." and "," were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a '"' on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using '."' and ',"' rather than '".' and '",', regardless of logic.” I don’t see obvious objections to that explanation. |