[Scribus] Re: On extra space [bug 424]

[Fred Albrecht]

Florian Arnold wrote:

> AFAIK, spacing after the period is language-dependent. E.g. in English 
> (American?) typography you normaly put a larger space after the period than 
> between other pairs of words, and also TeX takes this into account 
> automatically. On the other hand, in German (and probably in a lot of other 
> languages) there is no extra space after the period. Consequently, the German 
> language pack for TeX has this special English spacing rule disabled.

In French the rules are also specific, for example you have a regular 
space after a comma, but a thin space (which is non breakable, called 
"espace fine" in French) before a semi colon or a colon. This kind of 
space is also used to break up large numbers (where usians would use 
commas) as well as between typographical quotes (? and ?) and the 
enclosed text.

I presently have a problem w/ this BTW because I'm composing a mall 8 
page newsletter and the Latin 1 (or 9) non-breakable space ends up as 
squares in the resulting PDF file. And replacing them with regular 
spaces gives me line breaks in horrendous places... Any help with this 
would be appreciated.

I'm studying the Unicode charset to see if this kind of thing is 
supported but I don't know if :
- my current document which is currently Latin-15 can be easily 
converted to Unicode (or does Scribus store it as Unicode internally anyway)
- printers know how to handle Unicode

I'm fairly familiar with charset issues in electronic media but I 
haven't really done anything that had to do with printing in years (and 
I never ever did that much to begin with). So I know I have a lot of 
catching up to do.

BTW, congratulations to the author(s) of Scribus, alhough it's not quite 
there yet I'm confident it will soon be a major productivity platform 
for us Linux users.

-- 
Fred.
   Linux, {Free,Open}BSD mercenary {sys,net}admin @ N48?53.115 E02?19.31
      This message is made from the freshest handpicked electrons
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