Float captions

[skiasaurus]

From the babel-french documentation, p. 9: "In French, captions in figures and tables should never be printed as ‘Figure 1: ’which is the default in standard LaTeX2e classes... ‘Figure 1 – ’ is preferred."

Not sure how to effect this change in Softcover.

[draialexis]

🤔 is that a fact? I’ll check out some schoolbooks and make sure

[skiasaurus]

🤔 is that a fact?

If it isn’t, then we still need to be able to modify the number format to include a non-breaking space ~ before the colon.

[draialexis]

I’ll try and look into all that on monday

[skiasaurus]

Okay. I also just realized that this is really a two-pronged issue, because we have to

1. Decide which of the two possible changes I outlined above needs to be made, and
2. Figure out how to make the change.

If you look into item 1 (when you're able), I'll look into item 2. 😃

[draialexis]

Sounds good. My impression from re-reading the documentation is that "Figure 1 – blah" is preferred by LaTeX when in French mode, but "Figure 1 : blah" is preferred by the French Academy. But as you say, inserting a non-breaking space before the colon seems to cause problems for LaTeX, so...

I'll try to figure out whether there are examples of dash usage for caption separation in French scientific documents. If so, we should probably do that: seems easier when working with SoftCover.

Am I following / making sense?

[draialexis]

I looked into usage in some Maths dissertations, and it's all over the bloody place. Couldn't find any well-founded conventions about captions.

I even found a paper on notation conventions in French scientific papers (just not about caption notation conventions); and the author used English language conventions for captions! i.e. "Figure 1: blah"

It kind of makes sense though: if you write anything scientific worth publishing and you're a French speaker, you'll have it written in English. If you're looking for well-sourced, peer-reviewed papers, and you're a French speaker, you'll look for a paper in English. So we adapt our conventions, in fact if not in law.

In conclusion: dash ✅ space-colon ✅ colon ✅ "space-colon" gets extra points for purists, but doesn't seem to appear more than the others in my (admittedly small) sample

I can look into it a bit more -- do you think it's worth it?

[skiasaurus]

My (uneducated) opinion is that logically, adopting the English-language convention makes sense if you're writing in English, but not so much otherwise. That said, what I'm getting from your comments is that the difference is mostly an aesthetic one; if that's the case, then I would say you don't need to concern yourself any further with this issue—you have bigger fish to fry. :-P

[draialexis]

you have bigger fish to fry

It's mostly because that's a teeny tiny fish though ;p

Tell you what, I'll float (heh) the question to my neighbour and see what's up. He's writing a PhD in physics for a French university, I think he may have the final word on this.

I'm supposed to grab dinner with him early next week.

PS: I editted a bunch of my comments because they were a little bloated. I hope you weren't getting notified every time 🙀

[skiasaurus]

It's mostly because that's a teeny tiny fish though ;p

Absolutely; that's exactly my point. :-) Just for the record, I'm creating these issues as much for my reference as yours.

Tell you what, I'll float (heh) the question

🤮

PS: I editted a bunch of my comments because they were a little bloated. I hope you weren't getting notified every time 🙀

I was not.

[draialexis]

I'm expecting some extra input on this issue from my neighbour today, I'll let you know what comes off it.

[draialexis]

Thus spoke Louis from next door

In our case, keeping the dash still seems fine to me, using a colon preceeded by a space would be fine too but way harder to achieve, and colon without a preceeding space is kind of a no-no but probably also acceptable.

Edit: Holy huge.png, Batman!!!

[skiasaurus]

I'm not sure what you mean by "keeping the dash"; the current style is côlon sans espace. I don't know how difficult changing it will be, but I doubt that what we want to change it to would have much effect on that.

Regardless, much like #1 as it currently stands, it seems like something that could be improved upon, but ultimately a minor detail that can be safely neglected if necessary.

Edit (appropriately enough):

Holy huge.png, Batman!!!

I am constantly impressed by your knowledge of English idioms and colloquial expressions like these.

[draialexis]

I'm not sure what you mean by "keeping the dash"; the current style is côlon sans espace.

🤦‍♂️

...ultimately a minor detail that can be safely neglected if necessary.

👍

I am constantly impressed by your knowledge of English idioms and ...

😇