[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by phossler

2. Mostly agree that   everywhere would most likely mess up the reflow on an ereader, there are still some constructs that IMHO really do need a   so that you don't REALLY bad line breaks:

blah blah blah and gave it to Dr.<nl>
Smith to blah blah

Yep, but I only apply it in Print.

Mr./Mrs./Dr. are my biggest ones, so I sometimes just use a simple regex:

Search: (Mrs?|Drs?)\. ([A-Z])
Replace: \1. \2

I was digging through LanguageTool, and here's a more comprehensive one they use:

Search: \b(Atty|Sg?t|[SG]en|Ft|Gov|Hon|Prof|Mr?s|Mt|[DMJS]r|Col|Maj|L(ieu)?t|Brig|Capt|Cmdr|Cmnd|Revd?|Rep)\ .\s[A-Z]

That should also cover Prof./Col./Capt./Gov./Rev. and others.

* * *

But you have to think:

What are the actual chances of "Mr." or "p." landing at the end of a line?

• >95%+ exist within the line
• Only a handful are going to land at the very end of a line.
  
  • In ebooks, probably more likely, since it'll be read on skinnier devices + larger fonts

but we're still talking about a very small percentage.

So, here's a real-life example from a history book I typeset last year (189k words, 595 pages).

Left = Normal Spaces throughout
Right = No-Break Spaces

1 "p." + 1 "F.M. Last":



1 "p." + 1 "pp.":



1 "No.":



And see if you can spot the no-break space here:



There were ~6000 no-break spaces added throughout the book:

• Most land in the middle of text, barely perceptible nudging.
• Only a small % of those actually ever land at the end of a line.

And as you can see in the 218 example above, paragraph-level justification + hyphenation automagically takes care of the vast majority of THOSE, so you see even LESS spacing/line-breaking problems. (A percentage of a percentage.)

Side Note: I searched the book for "p." + "pp.":

• 1425 total.
• 21 fell at the end of a line.

~1.5%.

The % is probably similar for all the other categories I listed earlier too.

So out of 6000 cases, ~90 might've made a readable difference.

(There was actually 1 case of "Sen." ending a page. Now that was an egregious issue.)

Originally Posted by phossler

Since I don't this stuff for a living or for others (just me and my Kindle [sounds like a country western song]) 'house style' = 'my style' and if I decide I don't like it it's easy 'nuff to undo it. I've changed my mind many times to remove what seemed like a good thing at the time

In ebooks, I kind of relate it to Soft Hyphens.

Sure, you can run the HyphenateThis plugin to try to correct for no/bad hyphenation on some devices... but definitely don't use it in a book you want to publish.

Originally Posted by phossler

3. Hope you get the blog online soon (Digital Slug??)

Yep, that's the title.

Originally Posted by phossler

1. Looking forward to the blog

Me too.

I've been prepping for quite a while (hence compiling/referencing all these links to old topics).

Plus I've been re-pumping myself up the past few weeks. I need to kick everything back into gear.