LibreOffice plugin doesn't add spacebar after last character of prefix is a number

glotzbach

Report ID: 1748597952

LibreOffice plugin doesn't add spacebar after the last character of prefix is a number

To reproduce:
- Open/Create a document in LibreOffice
- use the provided plugin to 'Insert Citation' to open Quick Format Citation
- after having selected an entry, click on it (or press ctrl + ↓)
- enter prefix with the last character being a number, or any other special character (exceptions are: dot (.), colon (:) and semi-colon (;))

Actual behaviour: no space is added (except the excptions mentioned above)
Expected behaviour: add a space in all these cases (also when numbers & other characters are added)

adamsmith

(Obviously you can add the space to the prefix manually).

I'm not sure what's actually expected here. There's some risk in automatic space too much, since it does restrict options, but I can't right now think of a case where we wouldn't want a space.

glotzbach

(That's what I did ;) )

I can't think of a reason, either, why one would want to end up with the prefix attached to the author or year of publication (at least in APA)
(eg. discussion about the sign “@”Robinson, 2015)

It's interesting that the space is not dependent on the last character of the prefix. Note the following difference:
- (cf discussion about “@”Akkermans et al., 2013) [no space after "@"]
- (cf discussion about “@ sign” Akkermans et al., 2013) [there is a space]

The same 'space issue' plays with the suffix.

fbennett

It is meant to jump over quotation marks for that test, since the character beyond it might be a punctuation mark (which requires a space in the current setup).

I left it to manual insertion mostly for simplicity. It's easy to explain that a space needs to be inserted manually; if we do it automatically, there shouldn't be edge cases remaining that will confuse people when they hit them. That was the thinking, anyway.

I can think of a few cases where a space would not be wanted. Hyphen, em-dash, en-dash, zero-width-space, open brace, open bracket, and open parens are a few. Also kanji, hangul and the two flavors of kana--those should actually swallow space, if a character of the same class follows. I'm not sure about languages using Arabic script, and Hebrew. There might be a general rule in those, or there might be differing treatment among characters, and there might be differences across languages that share the same script. At least I don't know the answers to those.

Anyway, I'm agnostic, but there should be a pretty full list of do's and don't's before the joining typography is automated.

glotzbach

Wow, ok. Must admit I didn't think of other languages all the other special characters.

Never mind drawing up that list of do's and don'ts then :P