[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: AsSpaced function (was pmwiki-2.0.devel9 released)

[chr@home.se]

On 4 Oct 2004, John Rankin wrote:

> On Saturday, 2 October 2004 11:20 PM, chr at home.se wrote:
> >On 2 Oct 2004, John Rankin wrote:
> >
> >> I find abbreviations with a lower case letter are a common problem,
> >> like CoP or SOEs or BSc:
> >
> >Slightly related.. what's the plural of an acronym? For instance, let's 
> >say we write CCD for 'charge coupled device' as in:
> >
> >	The CCD in my camera has 3.3 million photo sensitive elements.
> >
> >When using the acronym in a plural sence, I think I should be writing 
> >something like:
> >
> >	The CCDs have become much cheaper lately.
> >
> >but because this is interpreted by PmWiki as a wiki word, I find myself 
> >writing something like this instead:
> >
> >	The CCD:s have become much cheaper lately.
> 
> <pedantAlert>
> 
> Short answer: the tidiest convention is that the plural of CCD is CCD.

Intrigued by your long answer below, I googled for
	acronym plural style

and I have to say that all the results I checked added an "s".

	The Chicago Manual of Style says that adding a lowercase "s"
	suffices to establish the desired plurals for most acronyms--CPUs,
	BIOSs, CD-RWs.

A common recommendation was to avoid apostrophes, and only use them in
special cases such as when the acronym ends in an S, e.g. SOS's.

* http://www.jhsph.edu/Press_Room/style_manual/a.html#acronym_plural
* http://www.osu.edu/resources/style_guide.html
* http://www.crh.noaa.gov/library/Grammar/Acronyms.html

Maybe this is something that is local, i.e. most of the hits I got where 
from the US, and there they prefer CCDs etc?

> Discussion follows...
> 
> This is a deep typographical poser. The question also arises in well-
> designed paper documents that use true small caps for acronyms and 
> other abbreviations. True samll caps are the same weight and x-height 
> as regular text. This is in contrast to computer-generated small caps
> which are usually lighter and than normal text and have a slightly
> taller x-height.

Oh... now I know what the 'noun' button is there for in LyX. I've always 
wondered about it, but I guess what it does is change the font style to 
small caps.

> Why would you use true-drawn small caps? Some people say that 
> capital letters in running prose are like lumps in otherwise
> smooth mashed potatoes.

True... it does look much better with small caps. When I think back, I
remember that I actually did use small caps to typeset some words in my
thesis, just because they looked bad otherwise. (And it wasn't much of a
bother either, since I just defined a macro for each word once, and then
used that macro everywhere to make sure the style was consistent).

> The best answer is to omit the ess. (I have seen this in many, 
> but not all, Adobe (may a plague of locusts descend upon their 
> spring gardens) documents.) 
> 
> But many people think this is a wierd thing to do. Sigh.

AFAICT, the majority opinion seems to be to add an "s", at least I wasn't
able to find another opinion during my brief search.

In my opinion its often much more important to keep the text clear and
understandable, than to keep it pretty. So from that point of view I can
see why clearly indicating the plural makes sense.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr