Re: [NonGNU Elpa] New package: electric-french

[Matthias Meulien]

Thanks!

I am a native french speaker and I would expect such a feature to replace the previous space with a non breaking space or insert a non breaking space. This is the behaviour implemented in Libre Office Writer AutoCorrection feature, Microsoft Word, etc. People are used to this and for a good reason: It doesn't interfere with their habit to enter space before most punctuation.

Also I would be interested in such a feature if it was available out of the box: I don't have the motivation to remember package name, minor mode names, etc. to install packages for such small features.

FYI at present time I am pressing "alt gr"+shift+space before punctuation chars when necessary.

When writing HTML, there're mixed usage of punctuation characters (by CSS, _javascript_ and the content language) and I am not convinced that such libraries help...

Le dim. 4 juin 2023 à 16:57, Ruijie Yu via Emacs development discussions. <emacs-devel@gnu.org> a écrit :

Hello,

I am proposing a new package called electric-french [1].  This stemmed
from a discussion on emacs-humanities [2], where Jean-Christophe
("l@tlo") outlined a few common practices on nonbreak spaces in the
French language.  See near the end of the message for the commentary
section.

First of all, I want to know if any other French speakers are interested
in using this package -- in particular, whether this is beneficial in
general, more than only l@tlo.

Secondly, if people are indeed interested, I hope this can ultimately go
to GNU elpa, but since I am still trying to get an employer disclaimer
(without which I am very reluctant to making any FSF open source
contributions), I don't want to propose its inclusion into elpa.git at
this very moment, hence this proposal into nongnu.git as a "temporary
workaround".

Alternatively, we can also pretend it were proposed for elpa.git, and
postpone the actual inclusion until everything settles on my end -- of
course, only if enough people are interested in this package.

I welcome any type of comments.  Anything, including the package name,
can change with a valid reason.  Though fluent in English, I am not a
native speaker, so there may be occasional errors on wording.  Nor am I
so much a French speaker, and most information present in the package
were either provided by l@tlo or obtained via some quick [search
engine]'ing around, so any correction on that is welcome.  Thanks.

(And I know I need to add the part-of/not-part-of Emacs paragraph to the
header.  I'll add it when I know which elpa we are looking at.)

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
;;; Commentary:

;; This library facilitates adhering to various spacing
;; requirements of French literature.  It provides a minor mode,
;; where when enabled, inserts nonbreak spaces before or after a
;; character whenever required.  By default, this includes all
;; "two-part" punctuations (such as ?, !, etc.) and all quotation
;; punctuations.

;; There are three customizable options at the moment:

;; - `electric-french-nonbreak-space': the space character /
;;   string to use for the nonbreak space.  Apparently, different
;;   locales use differenc space characters.  See details at
;;   <msgid:5FB8702E-0499-4231-AD2C-55906C27B60F@traduction-libre.org>
;;   on emacs-humanities@gnu.org.

;; - `electric-french-prepend-space-puncts' and
;;   `electric-french-append-space-puncts': which characters
;;   should have nonbreak spaces prepended, or appended, to them,
;;   respectively.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~ruijieyu/electric-french
[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-humanities/2023-05/msg00000.html

--
Best,


RY

--

Matthias