From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed May 21 2008 - 18:53:25 CDT
Beside this current problem, it should be noted that only 3 (4?) languages
have reached stage 5 (complete and reviewed) : English, French and
Portuguese (Iberian and Brasilian).
But there's still a bug:
- The French version has been reviewed and is correct in all pages that use
the right single quote and not the ASCII quote: counting the characters
used, and the XML, plain-text, HTML, and PDF formats.
- But the presentation HTML page for French
(http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/frn.htm) is still using the ASCII quote.
And another problem:
- Also in articles 4, 18, 21.3, 22, 25.1, 26.1 there's a semi-colon missing
a non-breaking space before it (NNBSP is possibly preferable, but NBSP is
widely used in most French sources, SPACE is always incorrect as well as
semicolon without any spacing before it, because no paragraph can be wrapped
so that a line will start by a semi-colon in French, and this space also has
fixed width and is not variably extensible like regular spaces: only minor
expansion equal for all characters is tolerated when building justified
narrow columns of texts, like in the original UN resolution published in
both English and French, side by side, on 10 december 1948 during the 183rd
plenary session):
http://www.un.org/french/documents/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/217%20(III)
- This is standard rule for all punctuation signs drawn using more than one
glyph, and that need some spacing around them (the only exception is the
ellipsis written without spaces before them, and long dashes that also need
spacing for the inner side). Note that the scanned original version from the
UN includes this non-breaking narrow space (in French AND ALSO in English,
but not necessarily in the same articles, as the use of semi-colon is left
discretionary depending on translation needs and clarity: a semicolon is
used in article 26.1 in French due to the problem when translating
"generally" which may become ambiguous if not clearly separated from the
second part of the sentence before which it is used). If you are not
convinced that this narrow space is there before semicolons (in French and
English), compare with the positions of commas and full dots.
- However the UDHR translation repository site chose to not accept any space
except regular SPACE. This is clearly a problem at least for French (so no
spacing at all is used for now before semi-colons in any of the proposed
formats), even though this typographic rule (as well as the doubled width
for spaces after sentence-ending full dots in English only but not in
French) could possibly be infered by the renderer (but only if the language
is correctly labelled with some extra markup).
Hmmm.... How does the reviewing works?
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] De la part de Philippe Verdy
> Envoyé : mardi 20 mai 2008 04:13
> À : 'Jim Allan'; unicode@unicode.org
> Objet : RE: Exemplifying apostrophes
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