Re: Sentence-end punctuation: French

[Michael Piotrowski]

"Valeriy E. Ushakov" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 16:49:41 +0200, Michael Piotrowski wrote:
>
>> > I have few books about this typo rules for Russian.  BTW, iirc, the
>> > space after sentence final dot is normal, but is more stretchable for
>> > the purpose of adjustment.
>> 
>> That sounds like a reasonable rule for all languages, but this is
>> not what the tex option (or TeX itself) implement, right?
>
> No, TeX gaps are what they call "glue" and the glue is not only the
> gap amount, but also the stretch/shrink-ability.

Yes, I know that, but is it actually used in the treatment of
sentence-final periods?  (I don't have a TeX book here.)  Or were you
referring to the *implementation* all along? (I thought you were
referring to Russian typographical rules.)

Sorry, I'm a bit disorganized today :-(

>> For example, if the user types "aaa : bbb", the space before the
>> colon should be removed if it is German, or it should be converted
>> to a non-breakable space if it is French.  Conversely, if the user
>> types "aaa: bbb", and it's French, the system should insert a
>> non-breakable space before the colon.
>
> Something like:
>
>     macro ":" { &0.16feu ":" }

Looks interesting.  I'll have to try it.

>> To stay on topic, because Lout has the notion of a "current
>> language" built in, I think it is already much better in this
>> respect than, say, TeX.]
>
> But the paragraph breaker is rather simplistic.  E.g. one can't
> express the constraint that the last short line of paragraph must be
> at least 1.5 times longer than the paragraph indent of the first line
> and should either be shorter than the full paragraph width by at least
> 1f or should be adjusted to be full.

Well, originally I wanted to say something like "provides a better
basis" or something along these lines.  My comments in brackets were
really intended to be rather theoretical.  Of course it would be nice
to have better rules for paragraph breaking.

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                                  <address@hidden>