By default, LaTex inserts a longer, intersentence space after a period. The exception is if the period follows a capital letter, in which case an interword space is assumed. This thread describes the situation (and how to work around it) nicely:
When should I use intersentence spacing \@?
However, I never follow acronyms with periods, so this behavior is a constant source of annoyance. It means that I always have to carefully proofread my document to make sure that I haven't forgotten the critical \@ between my uppercase acronyms and trailing periods. Not only does this waste my time, it violates the very good idea that content and the busywork of formatting should be kept separate.
Is there any way to modify this default behavior? If the string ". " occurs in my document, I always want LaTex to use an intersentence space.
Best Answer
why don't you define a command for acronyms that puts the
\@in automatically?this does, of course, assume that you don't want
\frenchspacingto get rid of end-of-sentence spaces entirely.(the tugboat macros have a rather more elaborate definition that uses "large small caps" for acronyms. these are just regular caps stepped down a size, and require that the argument to the macro be entered in all uppercase; we find the regular small caps too small for acronyms. the code is in the file
ltugcomn.stywhich can be found on ctan.)it might be observed that some of us find the wider spaces after "Dr." or "No." even more annoying (and frequently occurring) than narrower spaces after acronyms, and the solution to that isn't so uniformly addressable.