2012/9/4 Philip TAYLOR <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>: > > > Zdenek Wagner wrote: > >> I know that French uses tiny spaces preceding double punctuation. >> IMHO it should be a property of a font, not of a typesetting system. > > > Presumably you mean "a user-selectable property" rather than a static > property (one would not want to have to switch font in order to change > language, in most cases). But does this not then suggest that every > extant Western font would have to be modified to include this optional > feature, f such fonts are to be used for French) Surely, on that last > basis alone, a font-independent solution is to be preferred. > Not the font, only the language. Here luatex has an advantage that such features can be injected via lua without changing the font (if you know how to do it). I prefer this way because active characters may break some macros, eg a macro may expect an argument delimited with : with category 12 but if it is made active for French typesetting, this macro will not work. Some languages in babel make ^ active so that \^ could be input in an easier way. In such a case ^^ab does not work. TeX requires two characters of category 7. The definition of active ^ is quite clever and expands to ^ with category 7 in math. However, ^^ab is processed in TeX's mouth, expansion of the active ^ occurs too late, thus it is not easy to handle it on the macro level. That's why I do not like active characters, mere adding a babel module for another language may break the document. However, sometimes active characters cannot be avoided and sometimes they make life easier.
> Incidentally, thinspace before tall punctuation was also common in > British typography until a few decades ago, and some "typesetters who > care" still follow the same convention. To my eye, it is far more > pleasant than the crowded punctuation that is only too common these > days. > I found it in some old Czech books but it was thinner than in French. > Philip Taylor -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
