Re: Sentence-end punctuation

[Michael Piotrowski]

Reimer Behrends <address@hidden> writes:

> As I mentioned before, this discussion often becomes fairly
> religious.

Unfortunately, and I apologize for starting this thread.

> What I said is basically "take it or leave it" advice, and if you're
> happy, I'm not going to tell you what to do.

The good thing is, Lout *is* very flexible in this respect.  My
original posting was because "tex" spacing is supposed to work
(somewhat) like, well, spacing in TeX.  Since the "german" packages
for LaTeX turn "French spacing" (i.e., no larger space after sentence
end), I was somehow expecting Lout to behave the same, when setting
the language to German.  I think that in this context, it's resonable
to change the default in langdefs (since the sentence-end information
in langdefs is only used for "tex" spacing anyway, isn't it?).

Maybe the "compress" option should be mentioned in the User's Guide,
since it's the true opposite of the "lout" option: These two options
should enable the author to produce any desired spacing.

Now, as an aside, it might be useful to have other language-dependent
spacing information available: For example, I think in French, « » : ;
! ? are typically _preceded_ by a small space.  This could be
implemented by a small Lout function, but it might have some
undesirable side effects, so it might be better to have the engine do
this.  But this is just an idea--and I don't typeset French very often
;-)

Another, more straightforward, idea for the langdefs file: How about
adding the ISO 639 language codes as standard aliases?  This would
make translation from XML even easier.  (I'm currently using a
database as I don't want to require a modified Lout installation.)

Greetings

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