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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Re: Abbreviations and Ordinals


On Monday, 12. November 2001 11:22, Yann Dirson wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 09, 2001 at 04:31:13PM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
> > | 2. In German typography, ordinal numbers are indicated by a
> > |    period after the corresponding cardinal number. Normally,
> > |    you would want to have a smaller space after this period
> > |    than after a period terminating a sentence. In TeX, you can
> > |    achieve this by appending a backslash to the ordinal period.
> > |    How would one cater for this using DocBook?
> >
> >  , probably.
>
> Hm... in TeX, doesn't "\ " give a normal space ?

Yes.  But Marco put the question the wrong way, as the XSL stylesheets 
ususally do what he wants as they do not do what TeX does.  To make 
things clear for non-TeXnicians: TeX by default adds extra space (in 
addition to normal interword space) to sentence-ending periods, or, to 
be precise, as it has no concept of "sentence", it adds this extra 
space after dots followed by whitespace and (immediately or with only 
something like closing parenthesis in between) preceded by lower-case 
letters _or_numbers_.  For abbreviations ending in lower-case 
("f.expl.", f.expl.) and for ordinals you usually want to override that 
behavior by adding "\ " (or "~" which is like " ") after the dot.  
(On the other hand, you have to precede the dot with "\@" if it follows 
an upper-case letter _and_ is meant as period.)  And if you think all 
this to be much too fuzzy or if you follow continental European 
typesetting conventions you just say "\frenchspacing" somewhere (or use 
a package like "francais" or "german" that says so by default) which 
will switch the whole extra spacing feature off.

So the question actually should be: how (and where) do you teach the 
TeX default behavior to the XSL Process?

> Additionally, I
> guess such things would better be done by the stylesheet, although I
> can't think straightforwardly of an existing piece of markup for
> this. Maybe something like `<phrase role="ordinal">6</>' that would
> be rendered into "6. ", but that looks like overkill.
>
> Or maybe the stylesheets could parse the text, and interpret stings
> like "6. " as ordinals, and correct things appropriately ?  I don't
> think that'd be good...
>
> Maybe we should have some markup for those things that must have
> special formatting.  An <ordinal> tag ?

Or, the other way 'round, a <period/> tag.  But that would require the 
FO specification to support extra end-of-sentence space - or the FO 
Processor, as PassiveTeX does (I suppose - does it?).
--
Anders


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