[XeTeX] Typographic question : quotation marks and apostrophes

[Philip TAYLOR]

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.

Philip Taylor
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[1] A few decades at most.