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Re: Punctuation spacing
From: |
Ludovic Courtès |
Subject: |
Re: Punctuation spacing |
Date: |
Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:41:31 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.110004 (No Gnus v0.4) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) |
Hi Jeff,
address@hidden (Jeff Kingston) writes:
> I've never tried to do this systematically for the reason you
> mention, that then punctuation marks get that definition
> everywhere, even within equations etc., which I consider to
> be too tricky.
At some point, I was hoping that we might be able to make those
definitions visible only to, say, the body of address@hidden'. But then, it
is still visible to the arguments of all the functions used within the
body of address@hidden'.
Is there no way to somehow limit the scope of those definitions?
[BTW, I couldn't find the explanation for the special-meaning `//' that
must follow address@hidden', address@hidden', etc. Is it documented somewhere?]
> I'd be willing to cooperate if someone wanted to
> construct and test such a file.
Thanks, but so long as there is no way to escape the problems I
mentioned earlier (especially when it comes to passing invalid code to
the PostScript back-end), I'm not sure it's reasonable to include it in
the distribution.
OTOH, I'd really like to see this issue solved once for all. What a
terrible dilemma. ;-)
>>From a design viewpoint, I don't believe that tricky
> definitions that make what look like ordinary characters
> into symbols is the right approach.
Yes, I agree that it's not a very clean approach.
> Lout offers nothing
> else, but in an ideal system you would take a paragraph
> of literal text and apply a language-specific formatting
> algorithm to it. This way you don't need a whole new
> description language, just a general-purpose programming
> language. You basically have to do something like this
> anyway to handle right-to-left text, ligatures, and all
> the other weirdness documented in the Unicode book.
As far as Lout is concerned, I can't think of various possibilities.
1. The broken `def's (what I proposed) that will inevitably yield
hard-to-understand errors from time to time.
2. Definitions of `;' et al. with limited scope so that most erroneous
situations can be avoided.
3. Per-language hard-wired C code.
4. An extension of, say, `langdef', that allows everything we need to
be described.
I'm afraid (2) is not achievable. (4) would require way too much work.
(3) may require a fair amount of work as well, but perhaps it's doable
(and I think it touches the same area as margin kerning).
If we were to choose (3), we might even add new ad hoc primitives to
make it configurable, like:
";" @PunctuationSpacing before { 0.5s } after { 1s } {
Some text; with a semi-colon.
}
Or, at a higher level:
Hungarian @PunctuationSpacing { Some text... }
What would you advise?
Thanks,
Ludovic.
- Punctuation spacing, Ludovic Courtès, 2006/04/05
- Re: Punctuation spacing, Jeff Kingston, 2006/04/05
- Re: Punctuation spacing, Jeff Kingston, 2006/04/06
- Re: Punctuation spacing,
Ludovic Courtès <=
- Re: Punctuation spacing, Jeff Kingston, 2006/04/10
- Re: Punctuation spacing, Jeff Kingston, 2006/04/11
- Re: Punctuation spacing, Jeff Kingston, 2006/04/19
- Re: Punctuation spacing, Jeff Kingston, 2006/04/19