[XeTeX] Space characters and whitespace

Tobias Schoel liesdiedatei at googlemail.com
Tue Feb 22 18:26:20 CET 2011


Inspired by the discussion about stretching and shrinking in monospaced 
fonts, I have a question about the usage of space characters, (partially 
about German specific, but there seem to be a lot of German speakers 
active on this list):

1. Unicode defines some space characters: u2000 (EN QUAD) to u200b (ZERO 
WIDTH SPACE), u00a0 (NO BREAK SPACE) and u202f (NARROW NO BREAK SPACE). 
Some of these roughly correspond to tex-macros \, \; ~ and so on. How 
should these characters resp. tex-macros be used?

2. How should some ISO- or DIN-norms be interpreted in terms of "how to 
do this in xetex?"?
  - small space as digit group separator
  - small space as separator of abbreviations (e.g. z.B.)

Two apsects should be concerned:
  - line breakability: i think in both cases of 2., line breaks should 
be forbidden.
  - Copy/Paste-ability from pdf-viewers

Below a small example for 2.

\documentclass{minimal}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{unicode-math}

\setromanfont[Ligatures=TeX]{TeX Gyre Pagella}
\setmathfont[Scale=MatchUppercase]{Asana Math}

\usepackage{siunitx}

\begin{document}
\noindent
test 1234567890 test\linebreak
test 1 234 567 890 test\linebreak
test 1\,234\,567\,890 test\linebreak
test 1 234 567 890 test\linebreak
test \num{1234567890} test\linebreak
test

\noindent
hallo z.B. tschüss\linebreak
hallo z. B. tschüss\linebreak
hallo z.\,B. tschüss\linebreak
hallo z. B. tschüss \linebreak
hallo
\end{document}

Thanks

Toscho


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