Opinionated Text Formatting

Typesetting is complicated.

Problems with LaTeX

• hyphen/en dash/em dash
  • Most people don’t know the difference, and it can be automatically detected!
  • If the expectation of a typesetting program is to produce nice output by default, it should autodetect that.
• having to escape “normal” characters
  • UNDERSCORE IS THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE
• unicode/color unicode support
• left/right quotes
  • not so much a problem to use, but it lets people use literal " when that always looks bad
• automatic space detection
  • I didn’t even know latex did this until a week ago
  • it uses a heuristic to determine where the end of a sentence is
    • “any space after a period terminates a sentence unless preceded by an uppercase letter”
  • it isn’t even very good
    • screws up common abbrevations like e.g., Dr., et al.

Good thing about LaTeX

• User control!
  • user can select hyphen/en dash/em dash
  • user can override space heuristic with no-break, normal, and force-sentence-end spaces.
    • also select “french spacing” to disable the difference entirely
    • \ = force normal space
    • \@ = end the sentence after the next punctuation
    • @ = non-breaking space

Fixes

• “smart dashes”
• have the backend do the escaping for you
  • except for code characters []{}#
• unicode/unicode color????
• quote solutions
  • built-in [quote], [squote], [dquote] environments?
  • compiler warning for “”?
    • warning for ‘ would break apostrophes
  • “smart quotes” mode?
    • word-esque
    • could get stuff wrong
  • keep latex `` and ‘’ chars
• make sentence detection easier
  • force one-sentence-per-line!
    • it’s better for diffs
  • probably want newline backslash-escaping, to say “the sentence continues”
    • equivalent to latex backslash-escaping a space
  • ONLY newlines in the source create latex-style spaces
    • => don’t need \ or \@
    • BUT warn that if the line doesn’t end with punctuation, no way to force LaTeX to insert a sentence-space at that point
  • could warn if we think line has a partial sentence i.e. if it doesn’t end with punctuation
    • compile error?? -Werror mode??
  • could warn if we think someone has two sentences on one line, but that would have to use a heuristic false-positives
  • we can’t do automatic non-breaking space, although we can remove the need for them in some places
    • e.g. cleverref style reference API
    • so still have ~