[XeTeX] OpenType punctuation kerning, was: Ancient Greek hyphenation

[Will Robertson]

On 21/04/2007, at 10:13 , Adam Twardoch wrote:

> Will Robertson wrote:
>>> For example, again for French, while I think most people agree about
>>> spacing around "?", "!", ";", ":", ".",
>>>
>> And I *dearly* hope that OpenType fonts start to incorporate this
>> feature!
>>
> What feature?

I could have been more clear, there, huh? :)
I'm thinking of an OpenType feature (not sure if there is an  
appropriate one at the moment) that adjusts the kerning (or the side  
bearing, by switching to separate glyphs, if necessary) around  
appropriate punctuation characters based on the currently selected  
language.

So for the default language you might get something like: (crude  
ascii art approximations of kerning)
   Question? I thought so.
And then switching to language=FRA would give you
   Question ? I thought so.

As I recall, this would be particularly important for guillemets,  
which are reversed in german vs. french (etc.) and therefore require  
significantly different left/right kerns when used in those two  
contexts.

It's all stuff that can be done by XeTeX if you can be bothered  
(especially using the LaTeX csquotes package, which separates the  
formatting of quotations from their source text), but I feel it's  
certainly within the realm of what an OpenType font "should" do. What  
do you think?

Will