Message-Id: <9311241041.AA25375@sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
In-Reply-To:  (Your message of Wed,
              24 Nov 93 11:01:58 EST.)
              <9311241018.AA30454@gauss.math.uni-frankfurt.de>
Date:         Wed, 24 Nov 93 11:29:04 +0100
From: Anselm Lingnau <lingnau@MATH.UNI-FRANKFURT.DE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: \em and italic correction
Status: R


Thus quoth Werenfried Spit <SPIT@VM.CI.UV.ES>:

> I do not really know myself how difficult or expensive it would
> be to give \em  the power to include an italic correction at
> the end. An italic correction at its begin is easy, of course.)

As far as the end is concerned, it's easy to make an \em that peeks ahead to
see whether the next character is a comma or period and omits the italic
correction in that case. At least, this is the rationale I use when typing
stuff by hand. I've casually looked at the \emph{...} that comes with NFSS2
and it seems to me that it puts the italic correction in no matter what.

For a friend, I've written something like

	\catcode`\^^S=\active \catcode`\^^T=\active
	\def^^S{\bgroup\em}
	\def^^T{\futurelet\@next\ee@close}
	\def\ee@close{\relax\if\@next,\else\if\@next.%
	  \else\/\fi\fi\egroup}

(in the TeX we use, ^^S and ^^T are the TeX versions of the `french quotes' in
the character set), so he could write <<emphasized>> (where the quotes are
actually one character each). A solution without special characters might use
\aftergroup to do basically the same thing.

I'll leave the italic-correction-at-the-beginning bit to Werenfried (if he
says it's easy), since I haven't thought about that yet and don't have the
time to play around with it just now. Maybe somebody else has?

Anselm
---
Anselm Lingnau .................................. lingnau@math.uni-frankfurt.de
Now let me explain why this makes intuitive sense.    --- Prof. Larry Wasserman