Greetings All! I'm putting this query out in the hope that some of you will be expertly familiar with the details.
French punctuation is rather special! For instance, opening and closing double quotes are guillemets ("\f[Fo]", "\[Fc]" in groff), wth space between the guillemets and the text they enclose, so that you get something like Il a dit « Je vais sortir maintenant » ":", ";", "?", "!" are similarly surrounded by space. I have the task of translating some English PowerPoint slides into French (No, they won't be going into PPT, they will be set in PS using groff!!) I'm not expert on the full details of the French punctuation peculiarities. What I have done is to define a couple of macros, one (.FRpunct) to turn on the French punctuation, the other (./FRpunct) to turn it off. At present, these are: .de FRpunct .char \[lq] \[Fo]\h'0.25n' .char \[rq] \h'0.25n'\[Fc] .char : \h'0.2n':\h'0.2n' .char ; \h'0.2n';\h'0.2n' .char ? \h'0.2n'?\h'0.2n' .char ! \h'0.2n'!\h'0.2n' .char \[em] \h'0.2n'\[em]\h'0.2n' .. .de /FRpunct .rchar \[lq] .rchar \[rq] .rchar : .rchar ; .rchar ? .rchar ! .rchar \[em] .. NOTE: I have put in rather narrow extra space, because the text-boxes corresponding to the PPT slides are a bit cramped for space at times, and using wider spaces tends to cause the formatting to collapse. With that caveat (and the possibility, for more general use, of using wider spacing -- 0.5n? 1n?), I would be grateful for comments on the suitability of the above definitions. Are they complete? Should any be different? A related question (which I can probably solve experimentally, but would be obliged if anyone who knows could tell me) is whether the re-definitions of \[lq], \[rq], ? and ! will demote them from their default status as "end-of-sentence characters" thereby suppressing the extra sentence-space that would normally be inserted (I could always use .cflags to re-establish this property, if necessary). With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 17-May-10 Time: 20:05:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------