Detect wrongly typeset non-sentence-ending period

Question

Is there any way to extremely increase the spacing after sentence-ending periods in order to (visually) verify that all non-sentence-ending periods are correctly treated using \ and \@? Thanks.

Standard tools such as chktex and lacheck can also help with this. — Andrew Swann, Apr 29 '20 at 07:03
@AndrewSwann Including many false positives and true negatives due to non-perfect regexes used for such checks. — ivankokan, Apr 29 '20 at 07:36
@ivankokan Agreed - but they both detect the two errors in your example code. — Andrew Swann, Apr 29 '20 at 08:25

David Carlisle · Accepted Answer · 2020-04-27T18:59:57.760

10


\documentclass{article}

\setlength\xspaceskip{1cm}
\begin{document}

this is a sentence. This is Foo. is short for FooBar. and that should have been a comma.
This is not XML\@. And this was not written by Dr.\ Carlisle.
What happens after a semicolon; or a question mark?
This is Foo, followed by a comma.
\end{document}

edited Apr 27 '20 at 18:59

answered Apr 27 '20 at 18:14

David Carlisle

757,742

1

Add this to your example: "This is not XML@. And this was not written by Dr.\ Carlisle." You haven't exhausted the possibilities. – barbara beeton Apr 27 '20 at 18:17
I definitely need to sit down and read TeXbook properly! Is there any change to add a box, in some color maybe? – ivankokan Apr 27 '20 at 18:23
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@ivankokan not in classic tex, in luatex yes (well of course in classic tex it is always possible to do something, but the macros would be sufficiently complicated they would likely clash with many packages and be more trouble than worth for a debugging aid) – David Carlisle Apr 27 '20 at 18:25
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@barbarabeeton you are free to edit. And I know you are itching to add some commas and semicolons:-) – David Carlisle Apr 27 '20 at 18:27
@barbarabeeton OK :-) – David Carlisle Apr 27 '20 at 18:38
@barbarabeeton done – David Carlisle Apr 27 '20 at 19:00

Detect wrongly typeset non-sentence-ending period

1 Answers1