Re: Sentence-end punctuation: French

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

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.

> 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 ":" }


> 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.

SY, Uwe
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