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Re: [xml2rfc] assuming that period (.) ends a sentence is sometimes wrong

Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com> Sun, 28 February 2021 17:38 UTC

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Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2021 11:38:26 -0600
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From: Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com>
To: John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Cc: Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org>, xml2rfc@ietf.org
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Subject: Re: [xml2rfc] assuming that period (.) ends a sentence is sometimes wrong
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On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 12:14:27PM -0500, John R Levine wrote:
> I don't see how that would work in xml2rfc where <t> elements don't preserve
> spacing.

Provided it doesn't also lose alternative Unicode whitespace characters,
using &emsp; is an option.  In a pinch we could have an element to mark
the end of a sentence (<s/>).

> > The discussion came up because xml2rfc treated the dot in “Philip R. Zimmermann” as a sentence end.
> > This is a mere bug, and bugs can be fixed.
> 
> It is a hard bug to fix.  You can add a heuristic not to treat a single
> letter followed by a dot as a sentence end, but it's wrong sometimes since
> the single letter word "I" occasionally ends a sentence.

Indeed.  "U.S." is a perfect example, because it can appear in the
middle of a sentence or at the end of a sentence, and you can't even use
the case of the first letter of the next word to distinguish because
words naming principal U.S. insitutions are capitalized after "U.S."

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