Good… was beginning to wonder with all those wicked viruses going the rounds… whether I would get some form of reply.

The problem I think turns out to be related to the way I write French punctuation. I learned the hard way about this peculiarity of French typography where you must stick those non-breaking thin spaces where they belong and made a point of doing it by hand (in vim I haved mapped CTRL+K to U+202f). Now what happens is that from his name I guess that the gentleman who initially came up with the polyglossia package is a frenchman. As such he was very focused on this particular typesetting quirk and decided to ensure that this thin spaces business would be taken care of automatically by his package. I believe this is the way text processors handle it when you tell them that the material is written in French (?).

So what I am beginning to suspect is that pandoc invokes the polyglossia package correctly but since I do not rely on this being done for me by the package… it may very well turn out that polyglossia inserts a second thin space next to the one that's already there… adding up to what looks basically like a regular-width space. Not sure how I could check the resulting PDF and verify this hunch of mine. Another approach would obviously be to run a few regex's to get rid of all those U+202f's in my .md files and see what happens…

I took a look at the polyglossia doc as you suggest and I did find indications that polyglossia does add thin spaces automatically (that's the kind of feature that make polyglossia more 'modern' than babel I imagine) and that you can use the 'autospacing=false' option should you need to disable the feature.

Obviously most people would NOT want pandoc to disable the feature…

So it's really up to me to change my usepackage polyglossia invocation to make sure my thin spaces are left alone.

What would be the recommend way to do this… hard code something like '\usepackage[autospacing=false]{polyglossia}' in my ~/.pandoc/templates/default.latex I imagine?

Thanks,

P.S. how can I fix the typo in the issue's title… U+2024 instead of the intended U+202f?

On Saturday, February 1, 2020 at 2:18:30 PM UTC-5, Chris Jones wrote:

Searched online for similar cases and didn't find anything relevant.

The context is that I recently was made aware that the French insist that a thin space be inserted immediately before some punctuation characters ',:!?»%' etc.… So in dialogs for instance e.g. … the .md source has: « · bonjour mademoiselle · » where the middle dots represent a single U+202f non-breaking space.

When I take a look at the intermediate .tex file that pandoc generates the thin spaces are correctly converted to '\,' which I believe is the latex way of coding thin spaces. But when I run xelatex on the latex file and look at the resulting PDF I can see that the thin spaces have become regular-width spaces.

I compared the PDF output to another PDF I had created using plain latex rather than pandoc and the U+202F's that I typed in my .tex source clearly materialize as thin spaces in the PDF.

What I suspect at this point is that one of the latex packages that pandoc sticks in the generated latex file (or the way it is invoked? perhaps a combination of packages? …?) is causing this.

As to an MWE… I'm not sure it's really appropriate in this particular case…

Just in case… here's what I get from a minimal .md input file:

`\PassOptionsToPackage{unicode=true}{hyperref} % options for packages loaded elsewhere
\PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url}
%
\documentclass[oneside,10pt,french,]{extbook} % cjns1989 - 27112019 - added the oneside option: so that the text doesn't jump left & right when reading on a tablet/ereader
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\usepackage{ifxetex,ifluatex}
\usepackage{fixltx2e} % provides \textsubscript
\ifnum 0\ifxetex 1\fi\ifluatex 1\fi=0 % if pdftex
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{textcomp} % provides euro and other symbols
\else % if luatex or xelatex
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX,Scale=MatchLowercase}
%   \setmainfont[]{EBGaramond-Regular}
    \setmainfont[Numbers={OldStyle,Proportional}]{EBGaramond-Regular}      % cjns1989 - 20191129 - old style numbers
\fi
% use upquote if available, for straight quotes in verbatim environments
\IfFileExists{upquote.sty}{\usepackage{upquote}}{}
% use microtype if available
\IfFileExists{microtype.sty}{%
\usepackage[]{microtype}
\UseMicrotypeSet[protrusion]{basicmath} % disable protrusion for tt fonts
}{}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
            pdftitle={WME},
            pdfborder={0 0 0},
            breaklinks=true}
\urlstyle{same} % don't use monospace font for urls
\usepackage[papersize={3.75 in, 6.0 in},left=.3 in,right=.3 in]{geometry}
\setlength{\emergencystretch}{3em} % prevent overfull lines
\providecommand{\tightlist}{%
\setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
% Redefines (sub)paragraphs to behave more like sections
\ifx\paragraph\undefined\else
\let\oldparagraph\paragraph
\renewcommand{\paragraph}[1]{\oldparagraph{#1}\mbox{}}
\fi
\ifx\subparagraph\undefined\else
\let\oldsubparagraph\subparagraph
\renewcommand{\subparagraph}[1]{\oldsubparagraph{#1}\mbox{}}
\fi
% set default figure placement to htbp
\makeatletter
\def\fps@figure{htbp}
\makeatother

\ifnum 0\ifxetex 1\fi\ifluatex 1\fi=0 % if pdftex
\usepackage[shorthands=off,main=french]{babel}
\else
% load polyglossia as late as possible as it *could* call bidi if RTL lang (e.g. Hebrew or Arabic)
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[]{french}
\fi

\title{WME}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\$ ECM

\hypertarget{wme-title}{%
\chapter{WME (title)}\label{wme-title}}

en lettres capitales, soigneusement imprimées au pochoir\,:

--- «\,Crétins\,!\,» murmura-t-il.

\end{document}`

Customization is minimal: old style numbers (proportional) and one-sided since the document is not destined for hard-copy printing…

What I have in mind at this point to try and figure out what is happening is to work with a one line .md source that has some U+202F's and remove default packages until the problem goes away but before I do this I thought maybe someone has run into something similar or might suggest a better approach than plain trial and error to help determine the cause of the problem.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

CJ