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

There is a similar issue in accounting and finance books. American books say $100,000. In the books from the UK that I've seen, there is a thin space after $. Thin spaces are also often used in place is the commas in large numbers outside the US. 

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> On Oct 26, 2013, at 5:04 PM, "Bill Kasdorf" <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com> wrote:
> 
> I hate to see the phrase "the doom of <q>" ;-) though otherwise I was going to contribute much of what Liam just did. (BTW the most famous example of a writer in English using the dash rather than quotation marks is James Joyce. He hated quotation marks because he thought it made the content look "tentative": c.f. the use of "air quotes" for "so-called." No coincidence that he spent a lot of his life in Paris.)
> 
> The reason <q> has begun to look so attractive to me is that in my work with the EU Publications Office--who must publish many of their publications in many or all EU languages--the fact that quotation marks are actually different Unicode characters in different languages is an obvious burden. (One of many.) Could CSS be smart enough to associate an @xml:lang with a <q> and apply the proper Unicode characters? _And_ handle the usage (mainly spacing) variants Ivan called attention to in the first place? If not, then I may have to accept "the doom of <q>." Frankly, very few publishers actually use <q> anyhow in my experience; the quotation marks are literal text 99+% of the time.
> 
> The point I made about the EU OP may appear to be a minor issue because of course they have to create a different document for each language anyhow, so that could probably be done with XSLT, but that would be one less thing they'd have to worry about managing, and something that could be rule-driven.
> 
> Anyhow, I like the concept of CSS variants based on @xml:lang values, which of course can be done to some extent today.
> 
> --Bill Kasdorf
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Liam R E Quin [mailto:liam@w3.org] 
> Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2013 3:42 PM
> To: Bert Bos
> Cc: Ivan Herman; W3C Digital Publishing IG; Dave Cramer; Pierre Danet; Thierry Michel
> Subject: Re: Whose problem is a strange French typesetting habit...
> 
>> On Sat, 2013-10-26 at 16:11 +0200, Bert Bos wrote:
>> 
>> Another example of differing typographical traditions is how to use 
>> quotation marks: We have a <q> element in HTML, and that seems to make 
>> sense as long as you deal with English, Dutch or German. Just make the 
>> style sheet insert the appropriate quote marks at the start and end 
>> and you're done. But in French, the recommendation is to start a quote 
>> with an em-dash at the start of the line, nothing at the end of the 
>> quote, and nothing where the quote is interrupted either:
>> 
>> English:
>> 
>>   ... to the street. <q>Hello,</q> he said, <q>I'm John.</q>
>> 
>>   ... to the street. “Hello,” he said, “I'm John.”
>> 
>> French:
>> 
>>    ... dans la rue. <q>Hallo,</q> il disait, <q>je suis John.</q>
>> 
>>    ... dans la rue.
>>    --- Hallo, il disait, je suis John.
> 
> The em dash style is also frequently used in novels set in English. It requires a slightly different writing style, and so should not normally be considered a matter only of presentation: the author needs to be aware of potential ambiguities when the end of the quote isn't marked, as in your example.
> 
> British English uses single quotes rather than double, and in that style putting punctuation inside quotes has a somewhat different (and lesser) effect on typographical colour of the page:
> 
>    Nic chimed in mournfully, ‘Don’t you remember? Susan said “Never
>    eat them!” but we all forgot.’
> 
>> The 'quotes' property of CSS simply cannot handle that. To the point 
>> that I now think that the <q> element in HTML was a mistake: either 
>> it's too much (authors could add the punctuation by themselves) or too 
>> little (lacking mark-up for the “he said” in the middle).
> Agreed.
> 
>> B.t.w., older traditions in various countries are even worse, from the 
>> point of view of CSS. If a quotation was longer than one line, the 
>> quote mark often used to be repeated at the start of the line:
>> 
>>    He started to explain: “When I
>>    “ entered the church, there was
>>    “ already somebody there. I don't
>>    “ know who.” Then he stopped.
> 
> Although that's no longer done, you do sometimes see in English-language magazines a bar to the left of the text in speech. It's very rare though.  More importantly for the doom of “q” is the treatment of a quotation that goes from the middle of one paragraph to the middle of the next. You cannot write,
> 
>   <p> . . . . <q>The dark sock . . . .</p> <p> . .devoured.</q>. . .
> </p>
> 
> There have been a number of techniques invented in XML to handle this, because it occurs moderately often. Although they are all reasonably easy to deal with using XSLT and XPath, they are not necessarily easy to process with CSS I think.
> 
> Also not: in a multi-paragraph quoted text in English there is an open quotation mark at the start of each paragraph until the end is reached, so, in the “dark sock … devoured” example I just gave, the first paragraph would not have a closing quote and the second paragraph would have an opening quote and a closing quote half-way through, after “devoured.”.
> 
>> This style is not used in any modern books, as far as I know (maybe 
>> precisely because the computer has trouble with it :-) ), which is an 
>> argument for not bothering with it in CSS. On the other hand, maybe 
>> people want to mimic old books...
> It was abandoned with the increased acceptance of the closing double quote mark, long before the computer took its grim mechanistic hold over our lives.
> 
>> 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?
> 
> By involving and asking experts from multiple cultures. I'm particularly concerned about getting involvement from India and from places where Arabic scripts are used, where people may not be used to interacting with foreign groups or may even feel resentful.
> 
> But let's start by getting this second document fleshed out, and then maybe we could have a wiki or a document describing language-specific and culture-specific differences in specific areas.
> 
> There are also variations within subject domains, for example with handling of references, footnotes, marginalia and end-notes.
> 
> --
> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
> Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
> 
> 
>

Received on Sunday, 27 October 2013 03:31:14 UTC