[XeTeX] "new-babel", was: Ancient Greek hyphenation

Axel E. Retif axretif at igo.com.mx
Tue Apr 24 11:45:02 CEST 2007


On  24 Apr, 2007, at 03:18 , Yves Codet wrote:

>
> Le 24 avr. 07 à 00:57, Bruno Voisin a écrit :
>
>> [...]

>> There are other minute differences (which are less and less of an
>> admitted norm though) in French typography:
>>
>> - All paragraphs start with an indentation, including those following
>> immediately chapter and section titles.
>>
>> - Dashes in text (used to denote asides, like parentheses): in French
>> (I think) we use en-dashes, not em-dashes, and they're separated from
>> the surrounding text by spaces, as in -- aside 1 -- and not---aside
>> 1---as in the TeXbook.
>>
>> And so forth. Not even to speak about lists.
>>
>> But entering these territories things are all but commonly admitted,
>> and we're succumbing to what I precisely don't like with babel -- its
>> insistence on imposing supposed norms on the author.
>
> I quite agree with this. Most of Babel's norms for French (except
> indentation of the first paragraph of a section, perhaps) should be
> left to the author of the document, and if he doesn't care about
> French typography it's his concern, as well as his good or bad
> relationship with his teacher or editor.

Please consider foreigners! When preparing a book for my publishing  
house, if the author has an epigraph in French, for example, I want  
to be able to write \begin{otherlanguage}{french} and have it with  
the proper French typographical rules; and if there is a book in  
German in the bibliography, I want to say \begin{otherlanguage} 
{german} (or ngerman) and have it hyphenated properly.

Best,

Axel


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