Re: Punctuation and line breaking

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 07:28:59AM -0400, Reimer Behrends wrote:
> On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 10:11:40AM +0200, Ludovic Court?s wrote:
> > In French `typography standards', double punctuation marks (ie. ? ! : ;) are
> > always preceded by a whitespace, unlike in English (and Spanish as well 
> > AFAIK)
> > where punctuation marks are always written right after the previous word.
> [...]
> 
> Actually, isn't the rule that the double punctuation marks in French are
> preceded by a _thin_ space, i.e. 0.5s or 0.125f wide, rather than a full
> interword space?

Well, that's an interesting question but I don't actually know the answer.
There must be somewhere a book describing typographic rules for a given
language but I don't have it... Note that we can find a lot of informal
documents on the web that deal with it, but nothing `official'; all of those
that I've seen recommend having a space before and after double punctuation
marks. Note that Adobe has a very interesing site about typography in general
(in French): http://www.adobe.fr/type/topics/main.html .

BTW, here is another function that can be used to avoid having opening
brackets at the beginning of a new line (see previous paragraph...):

  def "(" left l right r { { l }" ("{ r } }

It's very simple but actually quite powerful (maybe not as powerful as the
non-existing-yet-Nonpareil... ;). Note that it would be nice if citations
(@Cite) couldn't appear at the beginning of new lines, but this requires to
modify the base package that defines it.

Cheers,
Ludovic.