I'm having an issue with French babel. Whenever I use any of the 1\ier{}
, 2\ieme{}
and so on constructs (to obtain 1er, 2e, etc.), the spacing following it behaves very strangely.
So, for example, if I use:
1\ier asdf
then the output in the PDF will be: "1erasdf" (notice the missing space between "er" and "asdf")1\ier~asdf
then the output in the PDF will be: "1er asdf" (with a protected space in between)1\ier~ asdf
then the output in the PDF will be: "1er asdf" (there are two spaces between "er" and "asdf", one protected and one normal; can't display properly here because of SE formatting limitations)
I don't want to use ~
every time I need these constructs (2nd and 3rd examples above), so my question: Is the first example above a bug or a user error? And what is the proper way to avoid such output glitches?
I'm using TeX Live 2009 on Ubuntu 12.04 (with LyX).
~
in TeX), or at least I've learnt it so. As a side effect,~
avoids any gobbled space that instead may happen between both words. But I don't understand your last remark: in his comment, egreg is suggesting exactly the same thing as me.french
package maintainer. It would be a wise thing to at least usexspace
so that a normal space is inserted when there is no punctuation immediately following the superscript. You would still need to write explicit~
characters based on context when you need a non-breaking space. But as others said, the output you get is the normal TeX behaviour – but babel French is quite user friendly, and I would not expect this as its normal behaviour (but I use custom commands, so I hadn't noticed it).xspace
package in order to handle correctly the space in such case.