Punctuation and line breaking

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

In French `typography standards', double punctuation marks (ie. ? ! : ;) are
always preceded by a whitespace, unlike in English (and Spanish as well AFAIK)
where punctuation marks are always written right after the previous word. So,
when using the `French standard', there is a problem with Lout's way of
handling line breaking: you can end up with a punctuation mark at the
beginning of a line, which looks quite poor.

The attached file fixes the problem with a few functions (one for each
punctuation mark) that makes a sequence like "word :" unbreakable. Here is an
example:

  def ":" left word
  {
    @CurrLang @Case
    {
      French @Yield { { word }" :" }
      else   @Yield { { word }":"  }
    }
  }

Lout really has a solution for everything... ;)

Cheers,
Ludovic.

PS: Would Nonpareil be able to handle this kind of issues as well?

defs.lout
Description: Text document