Before we have any more of this discussion, let me just emphasize that
my original concern was with the use of the Unicode emdash in the User's
Guide and Tutorial, where it gives bad results, according to the
standards of English typography. That is what I was proposing to change.
The issue about unicodesymbols was raised by someone else and is quite
orthogonal. Nonetheless, we can discuss it. There is another issue about
how these things are rendered on-screen, and yet another about output,
again all orthogonal. But they too can be discussed.
On 01/14/2010 05:06 PM, Guenter Milde wrote:
On 2010-01-14, rgheck wrote:
On 01/14/2010 11:39 AM, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
rgheck<rgh...@bobjweil.com> writes:
The input ligature can have unwanted side-effects.
Copy the following into a LyX window:
To get help, use
# ls --help
Look at the PDF. I copied the text back from xpdf and got:
Of course you do, because it is an endash. But if you put it in
listings, or in a LyXCode environment, you get what you would expect to
get in those cases. In the LyXCode case, that's because we find this:
ls~-{}-help
in the source. So LyX just handles this for you. I don't see anything
confusing about it.
As Jurgen said, do you have an example?
Now, change the command to typewriter font and try again. This time it
helps, as typewriter is one example of a font without this input
ligature. But you also don't get an em-dash even if you mean one.
This makes perfect sense: Typewriters don't have em-dash keys. So the
em-dash is rendered as "---". Which is pretty much how people used to
type it.
Why does LyX handle this differently from "~" and "\"?
I'm not sure I understand this question.
And, as I've said, the Unicode version gives the wrong spacing.
In the GUI window or in the output?
Output. If you enter "text[emdash]text", you do not get a line break
after the emdash. To get it, you have to mess around in ways you
shouldn't have to mess around. I'm not worried about spacing around the
em-dash. Though...
Spacing around an em-dash is both a font issue and a typographic one:
In German typography you put spaces around the "Gedankenstrich" (and
use an en-dash):
Halbgeviertstrich, länger als das Divis, steht zwischen zwei
Leerzeichen, außer in Verbindung mit Satzzeichen.
-- typokurz – Einige wichtige typografische Regeln
I don't think people writing
He came — and went.
will use correct spacing when told to use three hypens:
He came---and went.
spacing is the same.
...it seems to me that this is *exactly* the kind of thing writers
should not have to worry about, i.e., that ought to be handled
automatically by the typesetting engine. If LaTeX doesn't do that, then
there should be a package that does it, if there isn't one already. If
there's no such package, then I'd be happy to consider special,
language-specific handling of spacing around "---" and "--", if you
wanted to propose that. But I would not want to have special spacing
around the Unicode glyph, since it is just a character, and maybe I
don't want special spacing around it: I meant to be able to use it as a
normal character, if I want to do so.
And if the output is affected, the unicodesymbols file could replace
the em-dash with "\<tiny-space>\textemdash\<tiny-space{}"
It definitely should not do that, since that is completely wrong for
English typography. In English, there are no spaces, but you can break
after the emdash, though not before it. More importantly, the Unicode
emdash should translate as an emdash and nothing else. Which is a reason
to keep it as it is, since the translation as "---" can be wrong, as you
have pointed out.
rh
