End-of-sentence punctuation

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

I work on the XML output routines of Texinfo at the moment and have
to cope with the difference between full stops "." that mean the end
of a sentence and such that denote an abbreviation. In LaTeX, the
difference is made automatically by and large, but with "\ " and
"\@" there are two ways of overriding the default when it fails.

I though of using the zero-width space ​ immediately after a
"." for making it an abbreviation, so that the naked full stop is
always the end of a sentence.

The docbook2rfc mailinglist suggested an <eos/> (end of sentence)
element that is complementary to my ​.

I can't say that I like all this very much. Is there some sort of
quasi-standard, even if not widely adopted?

Thank you!

Tschö,
Torsten.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I work on the XML output routines of Texinfo at the moment and have
to cope with the difference between full stops "." that mean the end
of a sentence and such that denote an abbreviation.

You could use markup for sentences, or markup for abbreviations, or
both. Would you have some other use for either of them.

The simplest approach would probably be to use abbreviation markup, for

I though of using the zero-width space ​ immediately after a
"." for making it an abbreviation, so that the naked full stop is
always the end of a sentence.

That would be trickery, playing with characters. Besides, the
zero-width space does not logically change the meaning of a preceding
full stop character, and its effect on rendering (if passed to a
rendering engine as such) is largely unpredictable - most fonts don't
contain a glyph for it.

It _would_ be imaginable (though probably not wise) to solve the
problem at character level, if ISO 10646 contained separate characters
for 'full stop' and 'abbreviation point'. But it doesn't.

The docbook2rfc mailinglist suggested an <eos/> (end of sentence)
element that is complementary to my ​.

That's tag-soupish in the HTML tag soup tradition. Whenever you think
an empty element would solve your problem, you are probably solving the
wrong problem.