Add spaces to angle quotes for French guillemets

[aurelberra]

In 2014 support was added for angle quotes in BlackFriday thanks to @bep (#128). However, the French guillemets would also require non-breaking spaces: "this" should not become «that», but « that ».

Such further enhancement would make a great difference for French users, as mentioned in Hugo issue #3725.

[bep]

I can take a stab on this when I get some spare time, should not be too hard; but looking at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet

I guess we should add an option that should work for both "regular" and angled quotes, i.e. for gullimets in general.

[aurelberra]

Do you mean enabling “quotes”, «double angle quotes» and « guillemets » (with  ) as options, the first one being the default? That would be really nice and would cover most needs! I'm happy to test if I can be of any help.

Adding British-style ‘quotes’ would make the list complete, I think – cf. for instance LaTeX csquotes package, which also deals with second-level quotes, but we probably don't need such sophistication here.

[bep]

Currently we have:

• HTML_USE_SMARTYPANTS=> regular quotes (I call them that ...)

If you add

• HTML_SMARTYPANTS_ANGLED_QUOTES => Angled quotes (which fits the French norm)

If we add a new option:

• HTML_SMARTYPANTS_QUOTES_NBSP

Which, in both cases above, will insert  .

[aurelberra]

Ok, so you would combine two smartypants options. It seems fine, but I don't see how you could need   with the "regular", US quotes: what would be the “ use case ”?

[bep]

what would be the “ use case ”?

I didn't know about the French use case, either -- but I don't care too much about the usefulness, it just makes sense and is the simplest way to add this.

[aurelberra]

It has its own logic. If it's easier than adding an option like HTML_SMARTYPANTS_ANGLED_QUOTES_NBSP, then by all means!

[rtfb]

Wow, this baffles me a bit. Are you saying that there are cases in French when people write quoted text with extra spaces around it inside Guillemets?

[aurelberra]

Yes, this is the norm: « TEXT » (though these are thin spaces in good typography).

[bep]

It baffles me as well, but it is documented in the Wikipedia article linked above:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet

[rtfb]

Yes, this is the norm: « TEXT » (though these are thin spaces in good typography).

Damn, natural languages are weird :-)

documented in the Wikipedia article linked above:

Yeah, I missed that needle in the hay of information.

[inwardmovement]

It would be great to finalize french punctuation support according to #439