Good French punctuation using GNU screen

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Recently, I enriched my .screenrc with a few key bindings that make it a lot easier to follow the rules for proper French typography:

## redefining Ctrl-space would shadow Emacs' binding; that would be bad.
# bindkey ^  digraph '  '
bindkey ^ ^  digraph '  '
bindkey «» eval "digraph '<<'" "digraph '  '" "digraph '  '" \
    "digraph '>>'" "stuff '^[OD'" "stuff '^[OD'"
bindkey ?? eval "digraph '  '" "stuff '?'"
bindkey !! eval "digraph '  '" "stuff '!'"
bindkey :: eval "digraph '  '" "stuff ':'"
bindkey ;; eval "digraph '  '" "stuff ';'"
bindkey HH eval "digraph '  '" "stuff 'h'" "digraph '  '"

(Where ^[ is the actual escape character, and the line split on a backslash is actually a single line.)

With these rules:

• typing a question mark, exclamation mark, colon or semicolon twice in quick succession inserts the required non-breaking space before the punctuation mark;
• C-space C-space produces a non-breaking space;
• HH produces the letter h surrounded by non-breaking spaces, which is useful to typeset times;
• entering the opening and closing French quotes puts the cursor between non-breaking spaces that are surrounded by those quotes.

The only annoying part is that being able to type !! and :: can be useful in some programming languages: one must type these combinations slowly to have them displayed literally.

www.kurokatta.org

David Haguenauer <www@kurokatta.org>
$Id: gnu-screen-punctuation.malblog,v 1.6 2009/01/20 06:41:34 homer Exp $