[Blahah]

That's a styling issue, not to be solved by typing two spaces unless you're using a typewriter. Just adjust the size of a space to the appropriate size when the text is rendered for the reader (in a word processor for example).

[wnoise]

Even though it is a styling issue (I want about 1.5), you still need to distinguish the cases to the renderer. If you want different intersentence spacing than interword spacing, you can't just check for the presence of a period -- the rendered versions of abbreviations like "Mr.", "etc.", etc. need to not have two spaces after them. You either need a whole lot of exceptions built-in (which still fails for sentence that end with abbreviations), or to somehow mark the difference. Multiple spaces is still a nice source convention, because it's minimal and shows up approximately correctly.

(LaTeX does do simple finding of periods to support different interword and intersentence spacing. The recommendation is to use ~ after abbreviations; as a non-breaking space it also keeps Mr.~Whatsisname from appearing on two lines.)

[tablespoon]

> That's a styling issue, not to be solved by typing two spaces unless you're using a typewriter. Just adjust the size of a space to the appropriate size when the text is rendered for the reader (in a word processor for example).

Except that advice is way less accessible and has a fairly high cost-benefit ratio:

* Typing two spaces after a sentence: something everyone who can type already understands.

* "[A]djust[ing] the size of a space to the appropriate size when the text is rendered for the reader (in a word processor for example)": something only a tiny fraction know how do do, and even fewer are comfortable with. It's likely some unintuitive UI that is nonstandard, and that has even been changed at points between different versions of the same Word Processor.

[dctoedt]

> Just adjust the size of a space to the appropriate size

That would work IF the rendering engine knew it was supposed to use a horizontally-larger space at the end of a sentence (comparable to the CSS styling element "padding-right"). A uniformly-larger space would defeat the purpose, namely to make it easier to spot the end of the sentence through the extra space after it.

[leni536]

LaTeX renders slightly longer space between sentences by default. You need to put "\ " after a dot that is not an end of a sentence to have a normal space there.

[dctoedt]

Relatively-few lawyers even know what LaTeX is, let alone would be willing to use it for drafting documents for client use.

(At a family reunion a few years ago, I was discussing a book-in-progress with an extended-family member, who at the time was an exec in a very-large Silicon Valley tech company. He was astonished when I mentioned I was using LaTeX, via emacs org-mode, for the manuscript.)

And MS Word is ubiquitously used for contracts and other documents that get circulated for revision, because of Word's redlining- and commenting features. It's a network effect: "Everyone" uses Microsoft Word because "everyone else" uses Microsoft Word.

[bccdee]

Fortunately, Word agrees that two spaces is incorrect. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170/microsoft-word-t...