[XeTeX] babel

[Steve White]

Hi,

Zdenek, again I've come in to the middle of a conversation...

It's not clear to me how to implement the rules, or who is responsible
for implementing them (or quite what the rules ought to be).

Yes it is possible to implement, for instance, a french-specific
kerning in an OpenType font, that would implement greater spacing for
punctuation in French text only.

I have seen articles such as http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponctuation
which advocate implementing punctuation spaces by using non-breaking space.
To my eyes, such spaces seem excessive, and greater that what I see in
a few French books I have.  But if this is how the spacing is to be
done, I don't understand why it's appropriate for the font to
implement the spacing.

A bunch of hard publications are referenced in that article.  Anybody
have a copy?

Cheers!

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 9:11 PM, FC <firmicus04 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2012/9/4 Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
>>
>> That's bad news! I thought that François Charette implemented French
>> in Polyglossia well. What is missing? Maybe it could be implemented
>> fast. And are there good OpenType fonts for French? I know that French
>> uses tiny spaces preceding double punctuation. This is a similar case
>> as in Hindi where some spaces are used in front of question marks and
>> exclamation marks (I found it i some article written by an Indian
>> typographer). IMHO it should be a property of a font, not of a
>> typesetting system. GNU FreeFont already contains such language
>> features. Probably Steve White would know how to implement
>> Language=French so that colons, semicolons, question and exclamation
>> marks had proper French spacing.
>
>
> I was the first to admit publically that French support in polyglossia was
> suboptimal. I did some initial work with \XeTeXinterchartoks to have the
> most important typographical features covered (in theory the spacing around
> colons, semicolons, question and exclamation marks should be handled
> properly, but this was never seriously tested). Also as a matter of
> principle I never wanted to use active characters in polyglossia, but most
> importantly I left the rest of the work for others to do because -- besides
> the time issue -- I was not much interested in doing it! Despite French
> being my mother language, as a French Canadian I am not very familiar with
> the French typographical tradition, and rarely used French for my
> professional work (my main interest for developing polyglossia was in
> supporting languages in non-Latin scripts: Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Indic
> scripts, etc.)
>
> In any case, let's hope the current maintainer Arthur Reutenauer will take
> care to coordinate fixing this important lacuna in polyglossia. Many people
> complained about this over the years, but IIRC the only person who actually
> helped was Enrico Gregorio. If Ulrike is right that frenchb is already
> adapted for XeTeX, then the task may not be as complex as it was 3 years
> ago.
>
> While I am on this list let me ask you a related question. When Arthur took
> up maintenance of polyglossia last year his main goal was to support
> LuaLaTeX as well as XeLaTeX. Any news about this?
>
> Regards,
> François Charette
>
>
>
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