How to get LaTeX to ignore a period for spacing purposes?

May 9, 2005 6:36 PM

Sometimes in LaTeX I notice bad-looking rivers after the period in someone's title, such as "Mr. Jones" or "St. Thomas." I assume that this is because it is treated the "." in things like "St." as if they are sentence stops, and spacing them accordingly. How can I get this to stop?
posted by yesno to computers & internet (5 comments total)

You need to backslash-escape the space, e.g. "Mr.\ Jones".
posted by Galvatron at 6:58 PM on May 9, 2005

Depending on your preference, the tilde may be a better solution ("Mr.~Jones")--this inserts a literal space just like "\ " does, but also prevents a linebreak from falling between the two words.
posted by Galvatron at 7:04 PM on May 9, 2005

I'm always interested in seeing answers to questions when I have no idea what the question even means! LaTeX? rivers? wheeeeeeeeeee!
posted by netsirk at 9:13 PM on May 9, 2005

Me too, netsirk!
FYI, LaTeX is a powerful typesetting language popular in academia. "River" usually refers to a vertical run of whitespaces that are aligned on the page in a distracting manner, but yesno seems to be talking about a single overly-large gap.
posted by undecided at 9:29 PM on May 9, 2005

For completion, negative space can be intersted in math mode with \! .
posted by fatllama at 11:40 PM on May 9, 2005