>>Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 02:14:55 +0100 (WET DST)
>>From: Jan Warnking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>To: lyx-users mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>cc: Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Subject: Re: Quote and spaces (OT)
>>
>>On 10 Jun 2002, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
>>
>>> >>>>> "Jan" == Jan Warnking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>>> 
>>> Jan> Talking about quotes and spaces in French, I have an offtopic
>>> Jan> question: Are spaces after opening << and before closing >>
>>> Jan> really good typography in French? I know about the spaces (thin
>>> Jan> protected ones) before :;?! but am just not sure about the <<>>.
>>> Jan> I wrote a text in french (not frenchb, what's the difference?)
>>> Jan> and left out all such "typographic" spaces. Babel put them in for
>>> Jan> me before :;?!, but not between the guillemets and the following
>>> Jan> (preceding) word. The text "looks" fine to me but then, I'm not
>>> Jan> french...
>>> 
>>> See for example the bottom of this page:
>>> http://bisance.citi2.fr/typo/
>>
>>Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, I'm still not convinced.
>>Are you referring to this part:
>>
>>"Les guillemets ouvrants ou fermants sont, respectivement, precedes ou
>>suivis d'un blanc."
>>
>>(For people on the list not speaking french: "The opening and closing
>>quotes are respectively prededed and followed by a space.")
>>
>>To me, this means a space _before_ << and one _after_ >>. I think there is
>>no discussion about these. 

Sure, so there is no question about the typographic rule: if such a sentence is
written, the spaces referred to are those which are questionable, i.e.
surrounding the quoted text.

>>And since we are already way offtopic, I feel no shame repeating my
>>question concerning the difference between french and frenchb. How do I
>>know which one I need? 

frenchb come with the (La)TeX distrib (b stands for babel), 
and is thus portable if you want to pack a document source.
french is distributed in two flavours: light (which may come with a distribution)
and professionnal (which is shareware, AFAIK).
Further discussion on the subject clearly belongs to the french mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

>> (BTW, frenchb doesn't put spaces between
>>french quotes and enclosed text, either...)

True with 1.1.6 (unless you hack the frenchb.cfg file in the same
line as << and >> can be made active, I guess, but you loose portability):

False with 1.2.0, where the frencb \og and \fg are correctly inserted
(and the protected spaces appear on the LyX screen).
False also if you code � � as a character instead of using " " with
the correct language setting (I did not test this one).

-- 
Jean-Pierre

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