elision and different non-break spaces in French (support in MS Office ?) (was Re: New version of TR29:)

From: Patrick Andries (pandries@iti.qc.ca)
Date: Thu Aug 15 2002 - 09:51:59 EDT


De: "Eric Muller" <emuller@adobe.com>

> That being said, here are a few problematic cases for your proposal:
>
> "prud'homme" (a member of an industrial tribunal) is a single word, as
> are his relatives "prud'homal", and "prud'homie".

I believe TR29 gives a much more common example « aujourd'hui » (today) and
admits that it would present a problem for word-breaking.

>Speaking of French line break problems, there is also the case of the
>";", which takes a space before and after: "foo ; bar". Of course, one
>never breaks on the space just after "foo". Same for ":".

Well, the space is a thin non-break one (espace fine insécable), so
obviously no breaks. Same before minor punctuation marks like "!" and "?".
Before "major" punctuation marks like ":" , " »" and after "»" the
non-breaking space is larger (espace mots insécable).

This "espace fine insécable" is most probably U+202F. Unfortunately, I don't
not know how to test this. I seem to have only one font with this character
(Andalé Mono) but it seems wider than the normal no-break space despite its
name. Word also seems to make no distinction between both no-break spaces
(espace mots insécable and espace fine insécable) : it adds automatically
only the larger non-break space and omits the thiner one, I see no (easy)
way for it to automatically implement the proper spacing.

Any help welcome.

P. Andries
- o - 0 - o -
ISO 10646 et Unicode en français
http://hapax.iquebec.com



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