[Po4a-devel]Non breaking spaces in man pages

[Jordi Vilalta]

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Hi,

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Nicolas Fran=E7ois wrote:
> I think it is important: when used in a macro argument, "\ " permits to
> continue the same argument. For example:
> .BI foo bar
> has two arguments, the first one in bold face, the second one in italic
> (and they are displayed joined).
> Whereas:
> .BI foo\ bar
> only consist in one argument and is displayed as "foo bar" in bold face.

Thanks for the explanation.

[...]
> Thanks for the example. I can reproduce it (I didn't tried the ascii
> charset)
>
> The conversion of '\ ' to 0xA0 was done because some french translators
> used the latin-1 non-breakable space in PO, and it was useful for them to
> convert the 0xA0 char in the PO to a '\ ' in the man page (otherwise ther=
e
> is others warnings).

Is there a way to enter non-breaking spaces from the keyboard? Or did they=
=20
use some special software that diferentiates both kinds of spaces?

> What I propose is to keep the conversion of 0xAO to '\ ' in post_trans,
> but remove the opposite conversion in pre_trans. Thus PO will be valid an=
d
> translators will be able (at their will) to use 0xA0 in the msgid (and
> will have to set a correct charset in the header).

If I understood it well, it would be compatible with existent po files,=20
but the newly created files would have "\ " instead of 0xA0? (I would like=
=20
this approach)

> Do you think we may keep the 0xA0 if the user specified an
> $self->{TT}{'file_in_charset'} =3D UTF-8 or latin-1
> (should we then check in_charset or out_charset ?)

It's the first time I see 0xA0, so I don't know many things about it. I=20
see it like a strange character, hard to diferentiate from the standard=20
space in classic editors (correct me if I'm wrong). Personally I prefer=20
having "\ " everywhere instead of 0xA0, independent from the character=20
set.

> I'm also asking this for the TeX module (there I'm doing translation of
> accentuated characters, i.e. \'e in the TeX file becomes =E9 in the PO wh=
ich
> is then translated again to \'e in the TeX file).

This is a different case because it's easy to diferentiate a 'e' from a=20
'=E9' (both visually when reading and when writing each one).

Apart of this, I'll try to have a look at this conversion, because this=20
introduces undetected non-ascii characters (which should force the po file=
=20
to be in utf-8).

> These translations are, IMHO, user friendly (when it does not break the
> PO ;). They also help spell checkers or syntax checkers (acheck): for
> example, in French a ';' has to be preceded by a non-breaking space...

Oops, I didn't know that rule.

Regards,

Jordi Vilalta
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