From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Mon Sep 05 2005 - 18:40:13 CDT
Michael Everson wrote:
> At 14:55 -0700 2005-09-05, John Hudson wrote:
>
>> So, do these communities use it in TeX? Patrick was presumably asking 
>> whether they use it at all.
>
>
> I don't know, John. TeX developers saw fit to create the character and 
> name it, and put it into their implementations.
>
> Sometimes we add characters because they HAVE been used. Sometimes we 
> add characters so that they CAN be used. I don't have any problem with 
> this. Some people do.
FWIW (WAM)*, I quote from the manual of Makor, a Hebrew typesetting 
package for use with TeX:
>
> By and large, Israeli punctuation matches that of the rest of the 
> world.  One difference from American grammar is the frequent occurence 
> of the sequence `?!' to indicate some level of amazed incredulity.  
> Just for fun, I have included in my Hebrew fonts the `interrobang' 
> symbol ‽, which you can get by typing either !? or ?!.  Perhaps this 
> symbol will now sweep the world of Hebrew typesetting by storm‽
It does seem to be true that Israeli typesetting uses ?! more frequently 
than proper English typesetting does.  So I guess it's not necessarily 
so "ungrammatical" to everyone.
~mark
* "WAM" == "Which Ain't Much"
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