Re: French typography is back

["Robert-André Mauchin" <zebob.m@pengzone.org>]

 > Hans Hagen a écrit :
 > > Robert-André Mauchin wrote:
 > >
 > > The best would be to get rid off
 > > \setcharacterspacing[frenchpunctuation] and adapt the frenchb Babel
 > > module from Daniel Flipo (source and explanation here
 > > http://daniel.flipo.free.fr/frenchb/ ), as a module (t-french
 > > modification), or when loading the language, but I really
 > > don't know how hard it would be since it handles a lot more than
 > > just punctuation marks.
 >
 > no, active chars for such things are no solution and will not be
 > supported in mkiv; setcharacterspacing is the way to go (and if it
 > breaks that should be fixed instead); language support shoul dbe
 > in the kernel anyway
 >
 > Hans


I don't specifically talk about active chars (I don't really not what 
this is, I'm an user, not a coder), but instead of arbitrary adding a 
0.25em before and 1em after the punctuation mark you should use the real 
nnbsp (U+202F) before and real normal space (U+0020) after.

Why? Let me take your example again:

{\setcharacterspacing[frenchpunctuation]a? aa? aaa? abba?}

a\,? aa\,? aaa\,? abba\,?

Surprise: the first line is longer than the second. It's because sizes 
of the U+0020 and U+202F depend on the font design, their size are not 
exactly 1em and 0.25em.

Moreover, this is true that in french typography we should use a thin 
space before some punctuation mark, and a thin space in France *was* one 
fourth of an em. BUT due to modern digital typography, a thin space now 
correspond to something like one fifth of an em.
In digital typography, the normal space, i.e. inter-word separation, 
i.e. "espace justifiante" in French, has generally a size around one 
fourth of an em, calculated by the engine (you know that better than 
me). The thin space is a bit more than a half of the inter-word 
separation, i.e. between 1/8 and 1/6 of an em.

So I *really* believe that you should not define space before and after 
punctuation with "arbitrary" em spacing. There must be a way to do a 
"search and replace" with the correct glyphs (U+202F and U+0020) before 
and after punctuation marks.

 > language support should be in the kernel anyway

I agree of course, but although I believe this would encourage french 
"texers" to use Context, I don't think typography for a specific 
language is the priority for you&Taco right now.

I wish you luck for the next beta release!

Bob.
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