Non roman larger space width after phrases and even larger after sentence final punctuation

Question

There is a thread in TCoP regarding non roman projects that want to use variable spacing after phrase final (, ; punctuation and sentence final (. ? !) punctuation.

I’ve seen a couple of solutions suggested in those threads to use things like space followed by en/em space, spaces separated by u+200B zero width spaces.

Would these work for projects uploaded to the DBL and then accessed by You Version and other library card holders?

Answer 1

anon467281:

I’ve seen a couple of solutions suggested in those threads to use things like space followed by en/em spac

This is a bit of a wild guess since I’ve done very little with publishing paths downstream from Paratext, but in general, alternating with NBSP is a useful trick any time you want to display a sequence of multiple spaces in an HTML view. This includes some non-website applications; e.g. Paratext and Paratext Lite both use HTML views to display Scripture text.

Be aware that, if you’re editing in Paratext, it proactively removes extra spaces, so a sequence of EN EM EN spaces gets reduced to a single EM space when typed or pasted into Paratext.

If you instead alternate with NBSP (which Paratext represents as a tilde, to make it visible when editing), you can preserve whatever is on either side of the NBSP. For example, if you paste in a sequence of EN NBSP EM, Paratext does preserve that.

Using a zero-width joiner may work even better than NBSP, if you want more precise control over the total spacing or if you’re entering this in Paratext and don’t want to see the tildes. (I’m guessing this sequence is actually something you’d insert downstream from PT with a script or regex.)

Again, this is guesswork. Hopefully, someone in publishing can chime in if either of these is a good approach, or if there’s a better way.

Comments

P.S. I’m not sure if this is exactly what gets passed downstream, but one other trick that may be useful is to use Shift + right-click while in Preview view, and inspect the HTML in your browser. (Preview view is useful because it is read-only and thus can safely replace the tilde with a true NBSP.)

You can then hit F11 to inspect a paragraph and see what’s there. Screenshot below.

In my limited experience, this seems slightly more accurate than selecting text in Preview view and copy/pasting it into something like BabelPad for inspection.

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