[XeTeX] babel

[Georg Duffner]

Hi,

Am 2012-09-06 16:36, schrieb Zdenek Wagner:
> 2012/9/6 Tobias Schoel <liesdiedatei at googlemail.com>:
>>
>> It's simply checking for a flag that says "I want French Spacing" and then
>> including white space (in whatever form) at appropriate places. You can take
>> appropriate white space from the font according to your liking (there are
>> many in space codepoints in unicode) or do it yourself. At the most you can
>> ask unicode to include a special "Space in front of some punctuation in
>> French"-codepoint, but I doubt that would be successful nowadays.
>>
> No, such a codepoint is not needed and it will require additional work
> from the authors. If you understand OpenType internals, look how
> explanation and question marks are handled in the Devanagari script in
> GNU FreeFont. This is the right way because it does not need TeX
> solution in order to achieve the correct spacing. You can use the font
> in Word, in OpenOffice, in InDesign, on the web page and the spacing
> will be correct.
>

OK, this is the first variant I mentioned and it’s interesting to see 
that it’s hardcoded this way. I’m not on principle against such 
solution, but I see more problems than advantages. Some questions:
- Do other fonts share this feature?
- What would an indic person do if they wanted to write about a question 
mark? Do they switch off the script setting? (I’m a linguist, so 
meta-level typesetting is interesting to me)
- What do you do when dynamic spacing (as usual in textsetting like in 
Word) is applied? Spaces might decrease below the width of the 
whitespace in question- and exclamation mark which stays unvariable.
- How was this treated with in metal typesetting?

Best regards,
Georg