Buggin' My Life Away

Doug,

I'm glad you like the blog, and you'll get no shafting from me.  Indeed, my sole motivation in posting this has been to clean up much of the misattribution that's been directed at me.  If these guys would accurately restate the point I'd made oh so long ago, there wouldn't be an issue.

Having said that, the problem with Pierre is that he wastes enormous amounts of time and energy spewing righteous indignation in just about every direction imaginable with no concern about whether that indignation is deserved.

The issue with French punctuation and non-breaking spaces is a good case in point.  You can find a good summary of the rules and technical issues at http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/french.html.

It is, in fact, not possible to do proper French punctuation on any computer, and particularly with any Type 1 font, by using non-breaking spaces.  In a number of instances, the non-breaking space is too wide.  Most French users of Word don't use non-breaking spaces at all.  They use advance field widths to get the proper spacing.  Fields don't cause line breaks, because there is no character that can form a line break.  Fields merely change the width of the inter-character spacing.

And, with Pierre, therein lies the problem.  Rather than discussing the details of his problem and asking for ways to resolve it, he prefers spout reams of bile, in which he outright questions our competence and good faith, over the fact that he can't solve the problem in the manner he thinks is the most efficient way to solve it.  No human being deserves the kind of vilification Pierre directs at us, and, in a civilized world, there simply is no justification for it.

None of this means that Pierre doesn't have even several valid points.  And, I'll acknowledge the possibility that I may have missed one or two in the exchange he and I had, though I don't believe so.  I merely chose not to address every point simply because, well, the opportunity cost of addressing all of Pierre's points is just too high.  I have better things to do.

If there is something you think I missed and mertis attention, by all means, bring it up either in the comments or by clicking on the "Email" link in the upper left-hand portion of this page.