Sometimes students using LaTeX ask me how to do the typesetting of documents in French or Spanish. I'm not able to help them because I never learned to speak or write French or Spanish.
Different languages have different typographic rules to typeset documents. For English documents one can read Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style" or for German documents, for example, "Detailtypografie" by Friedrich Forssman and Ralf de Jong.
Do you know a document (book, article or URL) comparing the styles for some languages (English, German, French, ...)?
- abbreviations are written in German with
z.\,B.= e.g.), in English without any space,
- a dash in English is
---without spaces before and after the character, in German
- the quotation marks are different (“Foo” vs. „Bar“ vs. « Baz »; package
- vertical, horizontal and double rules in tables (package
- in German the ampersand & is only allowed in company names (Paul & Söhne), in English ?
- there are different style formatting footnotes in German (e.g. normal number, hanging, footnote text left justified or right left justified). Other languages?