How to make fonts bigger in **plain tex** math mode?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

> I suppose that due to HTML calling for
> multiple spaces to be "compressed" into one space (am I right about that?),

Yep.

> Why HTML was (presumably) designed that way in the first
> place is a bit of a mystery to me.

For the same reason TeX does it: It is the most appropriate behaviour for a markup language targeting regular human readable text. Now HTML does have provisions for preserving multiple spaces in code, originally using the <pre> element with other mechanisms added later.

> My wife uses Thunderbird (and probably has not customized it much). I got
> her to send me an email with two consecutive spaces, and Thunderbird
> "helpfully" (*cough*) converted the first space into a non-breakable space.
> […]
> Has this horse been sufficiently flogged?

Just to get in one more lash before we bury the poor creature, the original email was actually not a pure HTML mail. Its content type is multipart/alternative. The non-breaking spaces are indeed found in the text/html part, but they are also in the text/plain part. And for that, I can think of no excuse.

(It might be interesting to see if Thunderbird does the same thing if set to just produce text/plain.)

– Harald