[BRLTTY] English grade 2: Obtaining maximum occupancy

[Jason White]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:48:09AM -0400, Lee Maschmeyer wrote:
 
> It used to be that in grade 2 mode, when the last word of a string ended on 
> the last cell of the display, the next word started on the first cell. I 
> noticed that lately in this case the next word started on the second cell. I 
> asked Dave about this and he replied that he'd gotten a complaint that it 
> wasn't clear there was really a space between those two words so had changed 
> the behavior (or, since he's Canadian, the behaviour :-).
> 
> I like the old behaviour.

Just thinking about this, if I am proofreading a document in Grade II mode and
there is a missing space between words that happens to occur exactly on a
braille window boundary, then with the old behaviour I wouldn't be able to
detect the error. There would be no difference in what is displayed between
the version with and the version without the space. The same occurs if there
is a spurious space within a word.

With the new behaviour, the two cases are distinguishable. Unless I am missing
an obvious point, the new behaviour is correct because the old introduces
ambiguities. When there are many pages of text to be checked, this point isn't
entirely trivial. If this is correct, then I would suggest that the new
behaviour is in fact a bug fix and should remain in place.
The above examples assume that the error doesn't cause the text to be
contracted differently from what one would expect, which seems entirely
possible.