Re: Origin of Ellipsis

Quote/Cytat - Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> (Sat 14 Sep 2013
12:42:50 PM CEST):

> On 14 Sep 2013, at 02:30, Stephan Stiller <stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> This means that this dot will then need to be followed by two
>>> spaces when it is used as a sentence-ending period.
>>
>> This tradition is no longer current in the US. Though it's obvious
>> there are still plenty of middle and high school–level teachers and
>> college-level writing instructors teaching this in the US, not
>> knowing that books and periodicals in the US haven't been using two
>> spaces after a sentence-final period for a long time.
>
> Books never used it. The tradition in typing was developed to assist
> typesetters to navigate the typewritten text they were setting. The
> typesetters never put two spaces after a full stop.

Typesetter used variable width space, and some of them put a longer
space after a full stop. Cf. Knuth's TeXBook and the discussion of
\frenchspacing parameter.

Regards

Janusz

-- 
Prof. dr hab. Janusz S. Bień -  Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra  
Lingwistyki Formalnej)
Prof. Janusz S. Bień - University of Warsaw (Formal Linguistics Department)
jsbien@uw.edu.pl, jsbien@mimuw.edu.pl, http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/