CLDR TL;DR article

[Eric Muller]

On 12/24/2014 4:49 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
> Is that a rule that has officially been declared somewhere? 

Fortunately, there is no such thing as "official" typographic rules.

Two sources of recommendations:

The "Lexique des règles tyographiques en usage à l'imprimerie nationale" 
adopts an "espace fine insécable" before ; ! and ? but an "espace mot 
insécable" before : and » and after «. It puts an "espace justifiante" 
around —.

"Le Correcteur Typographe" by L.-E. Brossard has a whole chapter on the 
subject (starting at page 309 of volume 2, 
<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5492762k/f323.image>), with the 
most relevant discussion starting on page 317. It recommends 2/3 of the 
word space after « and before ». It also has a bit more details, such as 
a fixed space between ’ and «, a "demi-cadratin" after a « that is 
repeated on start of lines, a "demi-cadratin" after the — in dialogs, as 
well as in the form '« —' of dialogs.

In terms of Unicode in plain text, I agree with Philippe that some kind 
of space character is necessary in all those places where a typographic 
space is to appear.

  In my reprints of public domain texts (http://efele.net/ebooks), after 
having dealt with more than 100K pages of 19th century typography, I 
settled on using U+0020 ‘ ’ SPACE in the source texts, with a processing 
at publishing time to replace those by U+202F ‘ ’ NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE 
when appropriate. This processing is conservative and on occasion I use 
a U+202F ‘ ’ NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE in the source text. This approach is 
viable only because I control both the source texts and the processing; 
in some sense I have a "private" meaning of U+0020 ‘ ’ SPACE, which I 
justify (the meaning, not the space) by the immense simplification of 
the editing of the source texts it provides.


Eric.