From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2008 - 01:34:04 CDT
On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:43 PM, John Hudson <john@tiro.ca> wrote:
> The key word here should be *glyph*. Correct cultural norms for spacing
> punctuation should not be a text encoding issue at all, any more than
> spacing any other glyphs should be an encoding issue. These should be
> display issues, handled via font intelligence and language tagging.
Taken most literally, that's obviously not a common practice at all; I
note the spaces after your commas and periods, and the examples I've
seen without them have struck me as erroneous and deficient. While
every glyph has a certain amount of space around it, I get the feeling
the more I have to trust "font intelligence and language tagging", the
less consistent things are going to look among systems and the more
likely it is that things will come out just wrong on some system I
haven't tested. Given "it was said of him (a lot of things were said
of him; I'm talking recently) 'l'assentiment d'Alexandre ou non ;
toujours est-il que le nouveau roi'.", if you want it to have
different amounts of space around the two semicolons, I think your
best bet is an explicit marking. If nothing else, all the French text
that has spaces around the semicolons isn't suddenly going get the
spaces removed and the text tagged as French, and any cases where the
spaces appear in English text is going to get a sharply negative
response from the Anglophone world, especially that part which can't
imagine anyone anywhere doing it differently.
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