[XeTeX] babel

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Thu Sep 6 22:15:20 CEST 2012


2012/9/6 Georg Duffner <g.duffner at gmail.com>:
> 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?

Unfortunatelly not. When using other fonts, the author must insert
nonbreakable space of correct width manually.

> - 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)

They activate the Devanagari script (it is necessary otherwise
everything will be wrong). Then they use norma question and
exclamation marks. In Devanagari they behave in a different way than
in English but it is exactly the same codepoint.

> - 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.

This is exactly what is expected by Indian typographers.

> - How was this treated with in metal typesetting?
>
Probably the space was a part of the glyph. The oldest book I have was
printed in India in 1983. The spacing is the same as I see in newer
books and as implemented in GNU FreeFont.

> Best regards,
> Georg
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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