From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 14:24:30 EDT
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
> At 13:29 -0400 2003-07-07, Frank da Cruz wrote:
>
> >Nobody is springing to the defense of this so I'll only say that
> >it's a time-honored practice and we shouldn't be so quick to
> >disparage it, lest we be disparaged several years hence for the
> >things we do :-)
>
> It's rotten, and when I typeset books
> (http://www.evertype.com/books.html) I always have to clean up the
> text which is invariably littered with these artifacts of old
> technology.
I do the same thing: I compress all blanks with an invariable and automatic search&replace... before actually formatting the text with rich-text enhancements or markup. Multiple spaces are a real pollution when preparing a text for publishing...
I do the same space normalization when preparing delimited or fixed text datafiles for import in a database table (I don't trust the behavior of the SQL CHAR(n) datatype)
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