In one sense, you’re writing a stream of symbols, in which the . appears strictly before or after the ".
But in another sense, you’re writing something that will be typeset into a two-dimensional medium, such as a computer screen. The stream of symbols is source code that gets compiled into a visual presentation. Only part of that compilation process is under your control. You control the stream of input symbols. LessWrong’s CSS styles (and the browser’s defaults) control things like kerning and spacing. And the reader’s GUI settings control things like subpixel antialiasing.
Generations of typists were taught to use two spaces after a period; a standard that developed on monospaced typewriters. But typeset output in a proportional font almost always collapses adjacent spaces together: word spacing is not dictated by the number of space characters in the input stream. (Except where it is.)
Some writers experience frustration at seeing their “correct” double-spacing “broken” by modern typesetting. This is probably a deadweight loss of happiness; they would be better off not caring.
Sometimes, the author does need to take control of the whole typesetting pipeline, to preserve accuracy. That’s why Knuth created TeX. Most writers don’t have the problems that Knuth had, though.
Just to make it harder:
In one sense, you’re writing a stream of symbols, in which the
.appears strictly before or after the".But in another sense, you’re writing something that will be typeset into a two-dimensional medium, such as a computer screen. The stream of symbols is source code that gets compiled into a visual presentation. Only part of that compilation process is under your control. You control the stream of input symbols. LessWrong’s CSS styles (and the browser’s defaults) control things like kerning and spacing. And the reader’s GUI settings control things like subpixel antialiasing.
And, as it happens, when you write
".above and it’s rendered on my screen, the dot ends up entirely beneath the quote, and when you write.", the dot is mostly beneath the quote.This sort of thing is happening all the time.
Generations of typists were taught to use two spaces after a period; a standard that developed on monospaced typewriters. But typeset output in a proportional font almost always collapses adjacent spaces together: word spacing is not dictated by the number of space characters in the input stream. (Except where it is.)
Some writers experience frustration at seeing their “correct” double-spacing “broken” by modern typesetting. This is probably a deadweight loss of happiness; they would be better off not caring.
Sometimes, the author does need to take control of the whole typesetting pipeline, to preserve accuracy. That’s why Knuth created TeX. Most writers don’t have the problems that Knuth had, though.
Yeah, I messed around with Typst for the first time recently. There’s a whole dang world out there!