[Pxtl]

> H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence change

This is why I'm a firm "two spaces after the period" guy. Makes it unambiguous the difference between the abbrevs. period and the sentence-end period. Otherwise you get sentences like "Let's not forget that Dr. Principal does not care about this." which can be read in two valid ways.

[bloak]

Of course some style guides would tell you not to put a dot after "Dr" because "r" is the last letter of "Doctor". Similarly, the abbreviation of "Saint" would be "St", while the abbreviation of "Street" would be "St.", according to those style guides.

Meanwhile the GB military style guide says never to use a dot after any abbreviation, I think.

Also, the style guides I'm familiar with prescribe "H. G. Wells", rather than "H.G. Wells", but "H.G.W." if you're abbreviating all of the words.

None of this is of much interest to anyone who isn't an editor but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

[Pxtl]

> "H. G. Wells",

Right. That's probably the most common historical form, and is a good example of how the punctuation for sentence-ends and abbreviations is often the same - period and then single-space.

[cxr]

This trick doesn't work across linebreaks (unless you adopt a rule like "treat the spaces in the nouns as non-breaking and do not permit a linebreak for anything that isn't a sentence boundary").

[bloak]

Emacs does (or did) exactly that, perhaps by default: I think I had to disable it once because it was annoying me ... (setq sentence-end-double-space nil)?

[cxr]

Not the same thing.

[ta988]

Sidenote, I asked ChatGPT about where to put the comma and how it would change the meaning of the sentence. It got it right.

[Pxtl]

Fair point, the sentence I invented off the top of my head isn't perfectly grammatically correct but it's close-enough that it shows the ambiguity problem. It's a lot to ask text-to-speech and typesetting programs to figure out contextually which periods are abbreviations and which periods are end-of-sentence, and so having a hard text cue like double-space would help. Then typesetters would have a hard cue of when to replace the space with a thin-space (which is supposed to happen in the case of something like "H. G. Wells").

[jtbayly]

How does it feel to have websites and books and newspapers and practically every other place silently ignore your double spaces and treat them as a single space?