New \addcolon-like command that disables French colon spacing

[moewew]

From josephwright/biblatex-phys#16

In some instances it might be useful to have an \addcolon-variant that does not obey the French typography rules even if French is enabled.

Something like

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[french]{babel}
\usepackage[style=phys,articletitle=false,eprint=true]{biblatex}

\makeatletter
\DeclareFieldFormat{eprint:arxiv}{%
  \let\FDP@colonspace\empty
  \csuse{NoAutoSpacing}%
  \ifhyperref
    {\href{https://arxiv.org/\abx@arxivpath/#1}{%
        arXiv\addcolon
        \nolinkurl{#1}%
        \iffieldundef{eprintclass}
          {}
          {\addspace\UrlFont{\mkbibbrackets{\thefield{eprintclass}}}}}}
    {arXiv\addcolon
      \nolinkurl{#1}%
      \iffieldundef{eprintclass}
        {}
        {\addspace\UrlFont{\mkbibbrackets{\thefield{eprintclass}}}}}}
\makeatother

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\nocite{baez/article}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

We need

1. a good name,
2. to find a stable implementation ideally for both babel and polyglossia,
3. to check if other languages do similar things.

[jspitz]

I'd prefer a more general name than \addcolonnonfrench, e.g. \addnonspacedcolon, since spacing is not only done for French (in polyglossia for instance also for ecclesiastic Latin and Sanskrit)

[moewew]

Mhh, good point. I liked the analogy with \nonfrenchspacing, but this is something slightly different anyway...

I'm beginning to think maybe this whole macro was a bad idea. It is quite tricky to work against all possible modifications to colons that a language module might throw at us. On that note: Can the colon spacing in polyglossia's ecclesiastical Latin or Sanskrit be turned off (locally)?

[jspitz]

Can the colon spacing in polyglossia's ecclesiastical Latin or Sanskrit be turned off (locally)?

Not yet. This feature might be added eventually.

With polyglossia, a probably safe way would be to use \foreignlanguage{latex}{:}. The latex language is an internal language which is always loaded by polyglossia. It more or less conforms to English.

[moewew]

Can the colon spacing in polyglossia's ecclesiastical Latin or Sanskrit be turned off (locally)?

Not yet. This feature might be added eventually.

Oh bother. It would have been too easy if \NoAutoSpacing had been available in all languages that mess with spacing.

With polyglossia, a probably safe way would be to use \foreignlanguage{latex}{:}.

Thanks for that suggestion. I was hoping I could get away with something that works with both babel and polyglossia, but I guess that was never going to happen.

---

Still not sure if maybe we should back out and just remove this macro. The mess it is to implement and maintain seems hardly worth the limited use cases it is going to have.

[jspitz]

Still not sure if maybe we should back out and just remove this macro. The mess it is to implement and maintain seems hardly worth the limited use cases it is going to have.

FWIW I tend to agree.

[moewew]

I reverted f6b0817 in 97a983b. Currently it is too messy to implement a stable solution that works across all language modules. Setting this to wontfix for now. I guess the use case for a command like this was always very limited anyway, so I don't think it is a huge loss.