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

There was an idea in CSS to manipulate letter spacing between two
character classes, tentatively named the "text-spacing" property[1]; the
French rule is mentioned in 'punctuation' value of the WD.

The feature was cut from Level 3, but I wish to bring it back in Level 4.
The list of ideas are at the CSS WG Wiki[2].

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-css3-text-20110901/#text-spacing-prop
[2] http://wiki.csswg.org/spec/text4

/koji


On 10/27/13 12:30 PM, "Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken" <tsiegman@wiley.com>
wrote:

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.

Sent from my iPad

> 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. ³Hello,² he said, ³I'm John.²
>> 
>> 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, ŒDon¹t you remember? Susan said ³Never
>    eat them!² but we all forgot.¹
> 
>> 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 ³he said² 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: ³When I
>>    ³ entered the church, there was
>>    ³ already somebody there. I don't
>>    ³ know who.² 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 ³q² 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 ³dark sock Š devoured² 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
>³devoured.².
> 
>> 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 13:21:53 UTC