formatting French ebooks

You might think that formatting French ebooks in Curl as web markup would be easy – and it is – but there are still challenges.

If you use the TocDocument as the default document-style there are markup hierarchy issues under each {heading level=n, } macro.

I usually start with simply a default vanilla {paragraph } macro and then move to user defined formats and procedures.

The challenge is to make this accessible to the non-programmer working in a non-Western language.

At this time I am evaluating two rebol language variants (r3 and red) and one Icon variant (Object Icon) for parsing my Curl markup in accordance NOT with Curl syntax but USER preferences.

If all else fails, I will fall back to Logtalk with some Prolog dialect.

In the case of my current French ebook, the rules are to cover non-breaking spaces. The rule of thumb in France is to surround "two-part" punctuation with spaces. The challenge is to address resizeable text frames or panes in which re-flowed text must remain readable.

The minor rules apply to ALL Curl ebooks where the text is in Curl markup (and until we have a webkit wrapper library, that is what I use) such as converting all ASCII single quotes, quotes, psuedo-hypens, brackets and installing matching left- and right- quotation devices.

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