Hi, I agree. Actually, no french will ever write "Pourquoi?" with no spacing, be it in a source code or not. It's just wrong.
By the way, it seems that spacing was regularly used for centuries before these marks in english as well, in books and in handwriting. Then people got used to not seeing them after extensive use of poor typography with typewriters. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/590078/when-did-punctuation-marks-lose-their-associated-spaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sentence_spacing Le lundi 6 octobre 2025 à 06:00:52 UTC+2, <[email protected]> a écrit : Send ntg-context mailing list submissions to [email protected] To subscribe or unsubscribe via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [email protected] You can reach the person managing the list at [email protected] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of ntg-context digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: [BUG] Problem with french punctuation? (Romain Diss) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2025 20:45:19 +0200 From: Romain Diss <[email protected]> Subject: [NTG-context] Re: [BUG] Problem with french punctuation? To: mailing list for ConTeXt users <[email protected]> Cc: Pablo Rodriguez <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Hi, > > It seems there is a (recent?) bug with the french punctuation. > did it work in a different way before? Yes, the spaces before the punctuation were unbreakables wether they appeared in the source code or not. It is not the case anymore since I upgraded ConTeXt a few days or weeks ago (but I'm not sure when and not also sure from which version). > This is only my guess, but if you add an space, you may be on your own. In french, you always add the space. If you don't, the text looks odd. So ConTeXt should not let us on our own in this case ;) > A way of having what you want would be to remove the space or write > `Pourquoi\nbsp ?`. The source code of the text will be less readable with these adds (it also will take more time to write it). In my opinion, it is preferable to let conTeXt handle the spaces correctly (thin space, etc.) wether they are in the source code or not. Thank you for your help… -- Romain Diss ------------------------------ Subject: Digest Footer ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : [email protected] / https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl webpage : https://www.pragma-ade.nl / https://context.aanhet.net (mirror) archive : https://github.com/contextgarden/context wiki : https://wiki.contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------ End of ntg-context Digest, Vol 254, Issue 5 *******************************************
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