[XeTeX] Typographic question : quotation marks and apostrophes

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/12/15 Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
>
> Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> This reminds me of the French convention whereby a space is often inserted
>> before punctuation such as :, ? or !. I've often felt that this should
>> really be implemented as a language-specific variant of the punctuation
>> glyph (or language-specific kerning) in OpenType fonts, but in practice I
>> usually see it done by inserting a non-breaking space (or something similar)
>> within the text.
>
>
> I would like to add that this is not solely a French convention.
> Until /fairly/ recently [1], British English texts were also set
> with a thinspace before tall punctuation, a tradition that I
> like so much that I continue to use it to this day.
>
This convention is not used in the Czech language and personally I do
not like it. On the other hand, in some fonts the space between a
character and a tall punctuation is so small that it looks really ugly
before additional thin space. I would say that the meaning assigned to
characters by Unicode Consortium is one thing and the glyph shapes in
a particular font another. While thinking about typography we should
always look at the glyphs we wish to use no matter what Unicode says.

> Philip Taylor
> --------
> [1] A few decades at most.
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz