Sentences and Paragraphs
Author: Luc Maranget

## B.3 Sentences and Paragraphs

- Spacing
- Paragraphs
- Footnotes
- Accents and special symbols

### B.3.1 Spacing

Generally speaking, spaces (and single newline characters) in the source are echoed in the output. Browser then manage with spaces and line-breaks. Following LATEX behaviour, spaces after commands are not echoed. Spaces after invisible commands with arguments are not echoed either.

However this is no longer true in math mode, see section B.7.7 on spaces in math mode.

### B.3.2 Paragraphs

New paragraphs are introduced by one blank line or more. Paragraphs are not indented. Thus the macros `\indent` and `\noindent` perform no action. Paragraph are rendered by `p` elements. In some occasions, this technique may produce spurious paragraphs (see 3.1.1).

### B.3.3 Footnotes

The commands `\footnote`, `\footnotetext` and `\footnotemark` (with or without optional arguments) are supported. The `footnote` counter exists and (re)setting it or redefining `\thefootnote` should work properly. When footnotes are issued by a combination of `\footnotemark` and `\footnotetext`, a `\footnotemark` command must be issued first, otherwise some footnotes may get numbered incorrectly or disappear. Footnotes appear at document end in the article style and at chapters end in the book style. See section 7.3.6 for a description of how footnotes are flushed.

### B.3.4 Accents and special symbols

Thanks to Unicode character references, HEVEA can virtually output any symbol. It may happen that HEVEA does not known about a particular symbol, that is, most of the time, HEVEA does not known about a particular command. In that case a warning is issued to draw user attention. Users can then choose a particular symbol amongst the recognized ones, or as an explicit Unicode character reference (see Section 4.2 for an example of this technique).

Commands for making accents used in non-English languages, such as `\'`, work when applied to accent-less (i.e. ascii) letters and that the corresponding accented letters exist in the Unicode character set. Otherwise, the argument to the command is not modified and a warning is issued. For instance, consider the following source code, where, after a legitimate use of acute accents, one attempt to put an accute accent over the letter “h”:

    ``\'Ecole'' works as in \LaTeX, while ``\'h'' does not.

HEVEA output will be “École” works as in LATEX, while “h” does not. And a warning will be issued.

    ./tmp.tex:3741: Warning: Application of '\'' on 'h' failed

Observe that using input encodings is a convenient alternative to accent commands — see Section B.17.4.