[texinfo-pretest] Re: End-of-sentence punctuation

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) writes:

>     There it says (at me):
>
>     <!ENTITY period     ".<neos/>">
>
> I do not see any use of neos in the current texinfo.dtd.  Are you
> saying you added it?  What is its purpose?  (Not that I mind.)

Yes, it was part of the patch.  Actually it means the same as @: in
Texinfo.  So you may write

Prof.<neos/> Pauling loved vitamin C.

At the moment it means *exactly* the same.  However, it is more
logical to drop the "capital letter" rule inspired by TeX in XML.
So that there is no counterpart of @., @!, @? in the XML.  Instead,
*every* sentence-ending punctuation plus whitespace ends a sentence,
unless it is immediately followed by a <neos/>.  "Whitespace" means
[ \t\n], so

M.&thinsp;T.&nbsp;Smithee

is correct.  (No <neos/> necessary.)

Unfortunately, there is no Unicode that could be used instead of
<neos/>.  At least no really good one ("zero width space" &#x200b;
may be a candidate).

>     <!ENTITY period     ".<neos/>">
>     <!ENTITY eosperiod  ".">
>
> eosperiod seems like pretty much like a broken concept.  (I know
> it's been there pretty much forever.)

Yes, but I left it there in order to avoid trouble with the existing
C code.  Possibly I will clean it up sometime.

Tschö,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus