"gatt" wrote in message
...
Trivia: The period is put inside the quotation marks because in the old
mechanical printing presses, the metal type piece for a period was almost
half as thin (but still as tall) as the double-quote ["]. At the end of
paragraphs, the [.] would generally be the last type piece, but it was
very fragile. If there was any slop in the machine, the type piece could
wiggle or lean out of alignment and break off. For that reason,
typesetters preferred to tuck he period inside the thicker doublequote
metal type piece, and that practice filtered up to publishers and editors
until it became standard convention.

Hm, that story sounds suspiciously apocryphal. Do you have a source for it?

The vast majority of paragraphs end with a period and no quote, so the trick
you describe would seldom be available. Moreover, if the slimness of the
period type piece were really a problem at the end of a paragraph, the
obvious solution would just be to use a wider piece there that includes a
space after the period, or to place a separate space piece after the period
piece.

--Gary