Text FormattingOld fashioned spacing.

Information and discussion about LaTeX's general text formatting features (e.g. bold, italic, enumerations, ...)
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Laurentius
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed Feb 11, 2009 11:38 pm

Old fashioned spacing.

Post by Laurentius »

(NOT "french spacing" as with \frenchspacing.)

There are two things I should like to know. The first is probably simpler, but the second would be better.

1. Is it possible to get english / french spacing around "!", ";", "?", and "!" without selecting french as the language after whose rules words are split at the ends of lines, i.e. without \selectlanguage{french} ?

2. Is it possible to do this but also increase the space after the last period (or similar sign) in a sentence, e.g. to 1 em?

Thanks in advance.

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kaiserkarl13
Posts: 707
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:02 pm

Old fashioned spacing.

Post by kaiserkarl13 »

Yes, there are two commands that can be used to override spacing when writing in English spacing mode.

To tell TeX to use a normal interword space, use \ (i.e., a backslash followed by a space). To get an end-of-sentence space after the period, use \@.

For example, compare the output of:

Code: Select all

Prof.\ Smith has a program written in BASIC\@.  It does a really nice job.
to

Code: Select all

Prof. Smith has a program written in BASIC.  It does a really nice job.
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