Re: Sentence-end punctuation: French

[Michael Piotrowski]

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

> On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 14:25:13 +0200, Michael Piotrowski wrote:
>
>> BTW, does it also say something on the size of spaces inside
>> guillemets, and before exclamation marks, etc.?
>
> 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?  So, the langdef
for Russian should rather list no sentence-end characters?

[Maybe some words on why I'm interested in this stuff: In my opinion,
since typesetting systems deal with natural language and traditional
language-specific conventions, they should really contain
knowledge-based natural language processing (NLP) systems to produce
the best possible output according to the language; the user should
not be required to explicitly mark up stuff that the system can infer
from rules.  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.

Apart from convenience, I think this important because most users
today are not trained typographers; so the rich typographic traditions
of the various languages will get lost if they aren't implemented to
be applied automatically.

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.]

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