[Lingtyp] Technology standards in conflict with linguistic standards

[Guillaume Jacques]

> TYPOGRAPHICAL styles can remain diverse, Bernhard -- though you won't have
> much of a say here, unless you do do-it-yourself publishing.  Which reminds
> me, since we're at it, I've long wanted to know from (French) French
> writers whether it is for them a typographical or a text-structural matter
> to leave a (non-breaking, originally thin) space before bi-partite
> punctuation marks (i.e., all other than period and comma).  Assuming they
> are text-structural, deleting these damn spaces has cost me a lot of work
> over 20 years of editing Linguist. Typol., for despite everything we do get
> submissions from France.  But what if they were merely typographical, or on
> the contrary were intended as making a rhetorical statement -- and should
> have remained on both grounds?!
>
> Does LaTeX have a solution ?
>

Using a single command (\setmainlanguage), LaTeX automatically adds (or
removes) the spaces where needed according to the official orthography
depending on the language, and also automatically takes care of the rules
of indentation, that are slightly different between French and English for
instance. Also, since .tex documents are pure text, you can apply to them
regular expressions, which allows to automatically solve the remaining
problems, something impossible with a .doc or .odt file.
The beauty of LaTeX is that it allows one to concentrate on the content of
the papers, rather than on the typography and other menial tasks like the
bibliography, which are automatically taken care of.

-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques
http://himalco.hypotheses.org/
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
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