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The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

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Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#141

Post by cryptonector »

rodelrod wrote: post #44

This space before the colon and other marks in French should actually be a narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) [0]. There's no key for it in the AZERTY layout. This has been a problem since the typewriter age. People having to get on with their jobs coped with it by using a full, breaking em-space. Unless this gets replaced automatically by the word processor, you get horrid typography and misplaced line breaks all ov…

If you fail to put a space before a colon when writing in French, what happens next? Do people point and laugh? You get disciplined? Or would French speakers accept this as a better way to use the colon character?

It looks like this rule is based on old typographic considerations. Much like the Spanish Royal Academy's rule that capitalized letters carry no accents (unlike the opposite French rule that capitalized letters do carry accents!), which stems from typewriters not having accented letters, so one would type a vowel, backspace, then an apostrophe to make an accented vowel, but for capitals there's not enough space so you couldn't and wouldn't overstrike them.

Users and language academies should distinguish typographic from non-typographic language rules, and typographic rules should be context-specific (well technology-specific, since technology is the context).

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#142

Post by cryptonector »

jobigoud wrote: post #101
rodelrod wrote: post #44

This space before the colon and other marks in French should actually be a narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) [0]. There's no key for it in the AZERTY layout. This has been a problem since the typewriter age. People having to get on with their jobs coped with it by using a full, breaking em-space. Unless this gets replaced automatically by the word processor, you get horrid typography and misplaced line breaks all ov…

A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout for when you need it. In the BÉPO layout this is at SHIFT + space. Especially simple since all double punctuations (:?!; those that require an nbsp before them) are also accessed with SHIFT.

A modern solution is to abandon old, no-longer-relevant typographic language rules, or to make typographic language rules context-specific.

But I agree that we need to make several alternative space characters easy to type:

  - non-breaking space (for this French rule)
  - wide space (for disambiguating sentence
    ending periods from non-sentence-ending
    periods)
  - zero-width non-breaking space (for
    preventing word-splitting?)

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#143

Post by usrusr »

kps wrote: post #121
usrusr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly a joy on German keyboards where ` is a dead key that makes the system wait for an e, or an a to receive that accent and certain OS don't come with a nodeadkeys alternative keyboard map. I often find myself with the ` in the copy/paste buffer when worrying code-heavy markdown because pasting is so much easier...

Can't you just type [deadkey]+Space to get the ‘undead’ version? That works on Linux and MacOS and ChromeOS.

Sure, but it's super annoying when you write something in markdown knowing that being lazy with the proportional/monospace mix will noticeably harm understandability. Particularly when you suspect that readers will be close to failing to understand, doubly so when you suspect that this reader might be a future self. Is it worth the time writing? Only if I get the monospace right. Dead keys can make that writing situation a weirdly subtle kind of hell.

So annoying in fact that I've just spent the last two hours with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (yeah, I'm still a Windows person) shifting the dead key version to hide behind alt-gr.

Then I used it to mitigate some oddities on the dynabook keyboard (pipe and smaller/greater than weirdly moved to where the windows connect menu button usually resides) and continued duplicating some of the usual alt-gr suspects at locations inspired by their US KB position. Right now I'm an inappropriately happy person, let's see how I'll think about it in the future (getting too used to something non-standard cab be a terrible cost).

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#144

Post by usrusr »

keybored wrote: post #138
kps wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just type [deadkey]+Space to get the ‘undead’ version? That works on Linux and MacOS and ChromeOS.

Probably, but having to type six keys just to open a code block is probably painful.

Six keys, with a distracting lack of visual feedback on half of them...

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#145

Post by cryptonector »

sdeframond wrote: post #68
rodelrod wrote: post #44

This space before the colon and other marks in French should actually be a narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) [0]. There's no key for it in the AZERTY layout. This has been a problem since the typewriter age. People having to get on with their jobs coped with it by using a full, breaking em-space. Unless this gets replaced automatically by the word processor, you get horrid typography and misplaced line breaks all ov…

Or, word processors could understand that the pattern "some-chars" + + ":" must be treated as a single word in French. (I guess it's more complicated than I imagine it is, alright)

It's more complicated than you imagine it is. Basically you need to know both: whether the current locale is a French locale, and also whether original text was written in a French locale.

The former is easy enough, but also very annoying to multilingual people since one might run in a Spanish locale but occasionally write in French. So that's not a solution.

The latter is... hard to do, because while Unicode has language tags that you can embed in documents, those are deprecated and they were never well supported, and so there's no way to mark-up text as being in one language or another, and a document-wide setting wouldn't be enough nor sufficiently generic and standard and portable.

The best solution here is to relax the French typographic rule (since it isn't needed anymore). But that would take time to filter through to French speakers (writers, and readers) so that they learn to not put that pesky space before punctuation, but also so that they don't complain when it's missing.

Or... you know, this business of emoji pickers could be something you could turn off. Nahhh, that would never fly! (/s)

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#146

Post by benj111 »

Normille wrote: post #140
jobigoud wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout for when you need it. In the BÉPO layout this is at SHIFT + space. Especially simple since all double punctuations (:?!; those that require an nbsp before them) are also accessed with SHIFT.

>A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout An even better solution would be --for grown up people who have progressed beyond cave-painting and want to communicate using, you know, actual words-- to be able to disable emojis completely. Fucking moronic shite that they are. I've seen people on Twatter and FB have entire conversations in bloody emojis. Talk about re…

I'm surprising myself by saying this, but emoji are pretty useful in certain contexts.

Certainly more useful than the requirement to put a space before a colon, non breaking or not.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#147

Post by cryptonector »

Aissen wrote: post #42

Typographic nerd: technically, you should you use a non-breaking space (espace insécable) before colons in french. Doing that does not show the popup. Wait, what do you mean your keyboard layout does not have it? Keyboard layout nerd: you should use a keymap that has it. Like AFNOR's latest AZERTY or BÉPO. Historical nerd: traditionally wordprocessors have auto-inserted non-breaking spaces before colons, why should I…

> Historical nerd: traditionally wordprocessors have auto-inserted non-breaking spaces before colons, why should I care now ?

Because I don't want to switch locales in order to write short bits of text in another language. I don't even want to have to switch keyboard layouts -- just use compose sequences for diacritical marks and so on. And I don't use a French locale, but I do write French text sometimes.

I would imagine that in Europe this is a big deal. So many Europeans are multi-lingual... But you don't expect a Spaniard to switch to a French locale to write in French and vice-versa -- that's too disruptive.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#148

Post by cryptonector »

klodolph wrote: post #105
Aissen wrote: post #42

Typographic nerd: technically, you should you use a non-breaking space (espace insécable) before colons in french. Doing that does not show the popup. Wait, what do you mean your keyboard layout does not have it? Keyboard layout nerd: you should use a keymap that has it. Like AFNOR's latest AZERTY or BÉPO. Historical nerd: traditionally wordprocessors have auto-inserted non-breaking spaces before colons, why should I…

Or you should use a line-breaking algorithm that does not suggest a break at that location. Line breaking is supposed to be tailored to language.

This is all a big pain in multi-lingual documents. What, am I supposed to switch locales every time I switch languages? No no, that's absolutely not OK.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#149

Post by a1369209993 »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #60
bombcar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this is super, super common. Even where you have things like CTRL + X/C/V for cut/copy/paste it's clear that the letters were picked to be near each other - but then often the shortcuts will remain the same even on keyboards where those keys are nowhere near each other. This can be one of the reasons that switching to Dvorak can be super hard, all the shortcuts become quite weird unless you remap them each…

Some go as far as translating shortcuts, which I dislike even more. In Spanish Windows, copy is CTRL + C ( copiar ), but paste is... CTRL + P ( pegar )

> but paste is... CTRL + P (pegar)

... Oh, for fuck's sake! What English word do they think "V" is short for in the first place, there?

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#150

Post by cryptonector »

mrzool wrote: post #18
9dev wrote: post #2

There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no. One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing t…

As multilingual user constantly switching between 3 languages, that's why I fully committed to the US_intl keyboard layout a while ago and ditched the abomination that is QWERTZ. Took a while to get used to, but overall it has been a very noticeable improvement. One layout to cover all languages, no more constant switching. Edit for clarity: I type "a to get ä and 'a to get à. If I want to type actual quotes followed…

Yes, this. Though I prefer the X11 compose sequence business where you type 'a to get á and so on. X11 compose sequences are a lot more intuitive than the Windows U.S. international keyboard because there's no ambiguities, so, for example, a cedille is just ,c whereas in the Windows U.S. international keyboard layout it's 'c -- X11 for the win here, as the latter is super a) counter-intuitive and b) conflicts with ć (U+0107).

Also, if you program or use a shell, then the Windows U.S. international keyboard layout is just unspeakably unbearable.

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