“French” apostrophe?

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

> the apostrophe is not part of the word.

If people read the whole thing as a unit (as they would prefer to do, at least at speed) sure it is. The formalism of grammar is secondary.

Michel Boyer

The formalism of grammar is secondary.

Some knowledge may provide meaning to what otherwise might look like a flaw.

Spacing around the apostrophe varies a lot between editors and even between books from the same editor.

Since justification might cause distortion in spacing here are two occurrences of "s'est" from contiguous lines of Geert Mak's "Voyage d'un Européen..." that I find particularly well edited (Gallimard, 2010, 6 x 9 3/8 in, 965 pages, 1058 pages with endnotes, bibliography, index and table of contents).

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

What I mean is just because an apostrophe is used to combine two words doesn't make the result not a word in what matters most: reading.

Michel Boyer

Indeed. And it has to be treated as a word typographically, even if only part of it is emphasized.

George Thomas

Since justification might cause distortion in spacing...

Not trying to nitpick too much, but it should be pointed out that the contiguous examples are identical in spacing when overlaid in Photoshop.

Michel Boyer

 If they are identical, fine. I guess in principle they could not be, I don't know.

Michel Boyer

Kent,

Back to the original question, here are Arno Pro Regular with quoteright on the first line and u2019.cv (the "French" version) on the second line.

1. I like the look of the French version and I like the fact it was added by Adobe.
2. I don't like the fact it is in a locl in particular because locl is still not handled by TeX, so far as I know (I had to add the substitution in a style to get it)
3. Though the difference is not dramatic, handling the apostrophe in a locl implies that it will be spaced slightly differently when the language is changed (in a multilingual text). Is that what you want taking into account that it is explicitly said that in French typography there is no space before and after the apostrophe?

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

To me «L'être» and «l'âge» in the first line are indeed too tight... but «s'est» and «o'clock» in the second line are too loose.  :-/

Michel Boyer

My guess is that the French choice simply means "Better too loose than too tight".
To get the best of both lines requires a contextual lookup. A suboptimal solution is accepting a wider space on the right of the apostrophe.

Kent Lew

To get the best of both lines requires a contextual lookup.

Why would that be the case? Only if one is relying upon the substitution of a separate glyph to get the extra space in « L’être » and « l’âge ».

But, as I argued above, judicious kerning should be able to accommodate both unaccented and accented settings. (That is, assuming that both « s’est » and “o’clock” are acceptable as in the first line, as Hrant is suggesting.)

Michel Boyer

To get the best of both lines requires a contextual lookup.  (Michel)

Why would that be the case?  (Kent)

If you want exactly the spacing of the second line, how can you get the same spacing between the l and the apostrophe  without checking if the vowel following the apostrophe is accented or not? I am not saying you can't get an acceptable solution otherwise. What you may argue is that my choice of the word "suboptimal" was inappropriate. Am I missing something?

Kent Lew

how can you get the same spacing between the l and the apostrophe  without checking if the vowel following the apostrophe is accented or not?

By having the spacing between the l and apostrophe in the second line as the default in all cases. (And between L and apostrophe.) This would have little, if any, effect on English.

I took “the best of both” to mean the spacing of L/l-apostrophe and apostrophe-accents from the “French” setting and the spacing of apostrophe with unaccented rounds from the default setting.



Or, are you saying that the spacing between l and apostrophe should be different between « l’eau » and « l’être », for example, depending on whether an accented glyph follows?

Michel Boyer

Kent

I am surprised that you can have it look so good without a contextual. 

Michel Boyer

Mac TeX comes with the command otfinfo for which "otfinfo -s" reports font's supported scripts. After running in a terminal window the line command

otfinfo -s *.otf | grep French

in /library/fonts (on the mac) I got that  Hypatia Sans Pro and Garamond Premiere Pro also have support for French and I could then check that the spacing is more loose when the fonts are loaded in XeLaTeX with [Script=Latin,Language=French].

Here is the output I got:


Notice that Hypatia has a longer apostrophe in the French language. I added Gentium that has no special treatment for French but has a lower apostrophe I guess to better combine with the diacritics (I found nothing in the Gentium doc about it).

Michel

Christian Thalmann

Notice that Hypatia has a longer apostrophe in the French language. I added Gentium that has no special treatment for French but has a lower apostrophe I guess to better combine with the diacritics (I found nothing in the Gentium doc about it).

Isn't this just the fact that quotes are usually aligned with the cap height, and Gentium has a larger cap/ascender dimorphism than the other typefaces?

I like the idea of making the French apostrophe larger, if you're going to give it more space anyway. I wonder, though — wouldn't it be better to err on the side of generous spacing anyway? Do English words suffer from «French-style» spacing?

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

> wouldn't it be better to err on the side of generous spacing anyway?

For the conscious layer; for the subconscious, opposite.

Thomas Phinney

Huh. It's been over a decade, and now I can't recall if that longer French apostrophe in Hypatia was a deliberate choice—but I think it might just be a bug. I believe I recall changing the length of the default apostrophe, it could be the French variant got left behind.  

John Savard

In the case of English, "can't" is one word; it's a contraction of can not, but the omitted letter, replaced by an apostrophe, is in the middle of the word "not". In the case of French, "d'aujourd'hui", which means "of today" or "contemporary", is a contraction of du au jour de hui... so, in each case, the apostrophe indicates the omission of a letter at the end of a word. That would be a reason for the situation in French to be a little different from the case of English, perhaps calling for a hairline space after the apostrophe. But that's a separate issue from some typefaces or some fonts having kerning that is far too tight for any language.

EDIT: Upon reflection, I see that the functionalist perspective given here does have some applicability to kerning on the left side of the apostrophe as well.

Consider L' in Slovak, as mentioned earlier in this thread. In that case, the apostrophe indicates palatalization. Which means that a Slovak L' is equivalent to a Serbian Љ - and that suggests that, at least to some extent, the L and the apostrophe that follows it are thought of as part of the same letter. That would be a reason to consider tighter spacing between them.

Kent Lew

In Slovak, that is not an apostrophe! (Despite how it may perhaps be input sometimes in some “dumb” environments.)

It is an accented letter: Ľ.

So, yes, it is thought of as part of a single letter.

Chris Lozos

Great discussion started here by Kent!

notdef

This requires triplet kerning

I’ve rarely had the need for a kerning triplet, granted I’ve come to prefer a somewhat looser kerning style after having seen too many examples of over-kerning. 

Nick Shinn

Note that the look of French is very open, with spaces around punctuation where there would be none in English, etc. (The Canadian standard.)

“This is English!”

« C’est français ! »

Plenty of room around apostrophes harmonizes with this practice.