[xep-support] preventing line breaks before punctuation

[David Tolpin]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:57:44 +0400, Camille Bégnis <camille at neodoc.biz>  
wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi,
>
> This is what the "Abbreviated Typographic Code", maintained by French
> expert typesetters and Journalists (2005 Edition) says about non
> breakable spaces before punctuations:
>
> non-breakable "word" space ":"
> one fourth em quadrat: ";!?"
>
> This is largely used in all serious publications and taught everywhere,
> though the 1/4 quadrat is replaced by a simple non-breakable space in
> many cases.
>

Hi Camille,

XSL does not impose a style. It is equally good for English, Hebrew and  
Chinese (to certain extent). It is good when a company produces publishing  
turn-key solution that takes into account peculiarities of particular  
languages. On the other hand, it is definitely not a function of the  
formatting module (in XEP, it is mere 12000 lines of code, in any of the  
languages it has been implemented so far) .

A preprocessing module for the French language with fuzzy rules imposing  
stylistic correctness on the input is a good idea. It can be done before  
the formatting, and it should be done there. I am all for the idea of  
development of such languages, and it is an interesting area of  
application of one's talent. Just not inside the formatter.

David

-------------------
(*) To unsubscribe, send a message with words 'unsubscribe xep-support'
in the body of the message to majordomo at renderx.com from the address
you are subscribed from.
(*) By using the Service, you expressly agree to these Terms of Service http://www.renderx.com/terms-of-service.html