Re: Whose problem is a strange French typesetting habit...

(Eric sent this mail to the IG list, but that is a list where only members of the IG may post; the comment list is for everyone! -Ivan)

Dear Ivan,

Indeed, there should be a space in French before any "double" punctuation. But in good quality typesetting, this space is a thin space ("quart de cadratin"). An alternative if thin spaces are not available is a non-breaking space, but indeed is not always done properly on web sites.

Line breaking before a punctuation and no space before a punctuation are both mistakes in French typesetting... At Soleb we have automatic replacement rules that are used on all French texts - authors are usually very bad at this.

It would of course be a great thing to have CSS (best) or the reading system (universality issue) take this into account. 

Eric


Le 26 oct. 2013 à 13:04, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> a écrit :

> Reading through Dave's text[1]...
> 
> There is an unusual French typesetting habit? rule? that I have not seen in any other language. Afaik, in French it is required to have a space before a '!', a ':', a '?', etc. sign. (But not before a full stop.). Ie, you are supposed to write
> 
> 	Bonjour !
> 
> and not
> 
> 	Bonjour!
> 
> I also know that it is frequent on, say, Web sites of French newspapers to have a mistake of the sort:
> 
> 	je luis ai dit
> 	:
> 
> i.e., the line break occurs at the space between 'dit' and the ':' characters (which is really disturbing). 
> 
> The rules are not always followed; I just looked randomly at an iBook version of "Les misérables" and those spaces do not appear. I do not know whether this is considered as a serious mistake for French publishers (Pierre?).
> 
> The question is: whose job is it to control this?
> 
> - Up to the author, who should put a &nbsp; (non-breaking space) at the right place
> - The reading system, which should take this into account if the language is set to be French
> - CSS should have a control for this (afaik it currently does not)
> - anybody else?
> 
> I guess the more general issue is also what I referred to in[2]: how do we make it sure that the various requirements we may formulate are in line with different cultures and writing systems? Or at least they reasonably cover a major percentage of the globe's population?
> 
> Ivan 
> 
> [1] http://w3c.github.io/dpub-pagination/index.html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/mid/5F94D807-5727-4406-B03A-DA91469C6EC4@w3.org
> 
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> Ivan Herman, W3C 
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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> 
> 
> 
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>

Received on Sunday, 27 October 2013 07:54:23 UTC