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

On 10/26/13 7:04 AM, "Ivan Herman" <ivan@w3.org> wrote:

>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)

Interesting! This is a potential use case for the "text-replace" property
which has been implemented by PrinceXML, and which has appeared in some
drafts of CSS3-GCPM. We use this to manipulate the spacing around
punctuation--adding thin spaces between single quotes and double quotes,
constructing typesetter's ellipses, adding or removing thin spaces around
em-dashes, etc.

This property could add a  non-breaking narrow space (Unicode 202F) before
an exclamation point in French:

 html:lang(fr) { prince-text-replace "!" "\202F!"; }

Thanks,


Dave


This may contain confidential material. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender, delete immediately, and understand that no disclosure or reliance on the information herein is permitted. Hachette Book Group may monitor email to and from our network.

Received on Saturday, 26 October 2013 13:26:09 UTC