14.2.4 @frenchspacing val: Control sentence spacing

In American typography, it is traditional and correct to put extra space at the end of a sentence, after a semi-colon, and so on. This is the default in Texinfo. In French typography (and many others), this extra space is wrong; all spaces are uniform.

Therefore Texinfo provides the @frenchspacing command to control the spacing after punctuation. It reads the rest of the line as its argument, which must be the single word `on' or `off' (always these words, regardless of the language) of the document. Here is an example:

     @frenchspacing on
     This is text. Two sentences. Three sentences. French spacing.
     
     @frenchspacing off
     This is text. Two sentences. Three sentences. Non-French spacing.

produces (there will be no difference in Info):

This is text. Two sentences. Three sentences. French spacing.

This is text. Two sentences. Three sentences. Non-French spacing.

@frenchspacing mainly affects the printed output, including the output after @., @!, and @? (see Ending a Sentence).

In Info, usually space characters in the input are written unaltered to the output, and @frenchspacing does not change this. It does change the one case where makeinfo outputs a space on its own: when a sentence ends at a newline in the source. Here's an example:

     Some sentence.
     Next sentence.

produces in Info output, with @frenchspacing off (the default), two spaces between the sentences:

     Some sentence.  Next sentence.

With @frenchspacing on, makeinfo outputs only a single space:

     Some sentence. Next sentence.

@frenchspacing has no effect on the HTML or Docbook output; for XML, it outputs a transliteration of itself (see Output Formats).