Could you attach a diffshot, or at least a representative subset?

Hmm, strangely, only the space after "E.g." is affected visually (in the expected way):

Escaping the other spaces, like the one between "P.J." and "Plauger" seems to have had no effect. I'm not sure why...

That is odd! I imagine there may be built-in heuristics that detect things like initials and common abbreviations.

Could you please reduce the change to the minimal effective set? (And do feel free to also remove existing, ineffective backslashes.) Thanks!

For names with initials, how would you feel about using "~", as in "P.J.~Plauger"? We currently don't happen to have a line break there, but if preceding content is changed one day, that could change without us noticing, and might look bad.

I feel pretty much entirely indifferent. It's not currently a problem, we don't have a ton of names with initials, nor do we expect to gain more, and the existing occurrences aren't likely to be touched. So I'd just keep it as is, and simple.

Is there a visual diff if you use ~?

There is no visual difference between using ~ and \ aside from ~ inserting a non-breaking space.

The basic algorithm is that if the character preceding a period is uppercase, then interword spacing is used. Otherwise, end-of-sentence spacing it used.

So P.J. Plauger would result in an interword spacing while E.g. list would result in end-of-sentence spacing.

Oh, and if you use a comma after e.g. and i.e. then an interword space will be used there as well.

Ah yes, makes sense, thanks.

I would retain the status quo in that case.

Ah great, thanks for the explanation! I'll implement that "character preceding period is uppercase" heuristic for sentence splitting in cxxdraft-htmlgen as well.

That will resolve my real issue (because my ulterior motive was to use the "\ " or "~" to have cxxdraft-htmlgen not split the sentences there), and given that LaTeX apparently already handles almost all of this just fine by itself after all, I agree it's not worth caring about. :)

Closing, cheers!

I mean, do feel free to fix that one "E.g." case if you like. Or better yet, say "For example,". Or don't.

Personally, I'd prefer For example, as I don't like using E.g. or I.e. to start a sentence.

Ok you convinced me... but then I discovered that if you force push to a branch used in a pull request that is currently closed, then you cannot reopen that pull request anymore (the "Reopen and comment" button is greyed out now). :)

Hah, how weird. Have you tried editing the markup to ungrey it? :-)

Ok you convinced me... but then I discovered that if you force push to a branch used in a pull request that is currently closed, then you cannot reopen that pull request anymore (the "Reopen and comment" button is greyed out now). :)

That's solved by force-pushing back to the HEAD commit of the PR.