[XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/6 Tobias Schoel <liesdiedatei at googlemail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> [snip]
>
>
>> Two possible smartfont techniques for such locale feature are:
>> - alternate french punctuation marks with larger sidebearings: this is
>> very unflexible for users (punctuation characters without additional
>> space or with different space width are troublesome) but of course
>> simplifies the typesetting engines' troubles the most.
>> - contextual variant of the <non breaking space> character: the
>> typesetter or their engine has to enter a space at the correct place
>> that then gets replaced by a (narrower) variant; here I think the
>> engine's troubles aren't really diminuished a lot, but the users' might
>> rise. What's more, contextual lookups that involve <space> don't work
>> with XeTeX, so this is not very lucky here too.
>
> As far as I know, TeX's view of spaces is to not handle them as characters
> but as space without characters. So I don't understand, why French Spacing
> should change in any way between pdftex and xetex. Space without characters
> doesn't care for encoding nor fonts, because there is no character to be
> encoded or handled in any way by a font.
>
>
>>
>> Unicode already provides for a bunch of different space characters. IMO,
>> type designers should provide their fonts with appropriate space
>> characters (eg. 6-per-em space or thin space) and the typesetter or
>> their engine should check for the presence of that character and use it.
>
>
> Even if whitespace is left to the font, which is perfectly reasonable but
> not the TeX way, why should French Spacing be left to the font at all?
>
> 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.

> BYe
>
> Toscho
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz