14.3.4 @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 section 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 section Output Formats).