My '\,' thin spaces materialize as what looks like regular-width spaces in the PDF output of my xelatex compilation.
The latex file is generated from markdowon files via pandoc and as such the latex preamble contains a slew of packages many of which are not clearly useful to my use case.Since this only happens when I use pandoc (I compared with a document I'd written in plain latex a year ago and all those Gallic thin spaces are absolutely fine), I would imagine this may be caused by one of the latex packages generated by pandoc by default or the way it is invoked.
Unfortunately this is a document written in French where thin spaces are mandatory when using a number of punctuation signs: "; : ! ? % « »" among others.
To clarify… in a dialog that strictly follows the rules of French typesetting you must come up with something like: «°Sacrebleu°!°» where the '°' are (non-breaking) thin spaces. Anything else such as regular-width spaces is a no-no.
Has anyone come across anything like this before?
I've tried switching the font from EBGaramond to Linux Libertine or Charis Sil and still have the same problem.
I'll probably end up removing packages from the intermediate latex file one at a time until the problem goes away to help narrow it down but I thought I'd ask here first just in case somebody familiar with tex's logic might hazard a guess at what might be going on.
Thanks,
Edit - 22:00 hrs. EST:
It appears that the polyglossia package automatically adds thin spaces to punctuation signs wherever they are required by French typesetting rules. As a result since I already use thin spaces in my source… and polyglossia doesn't know that… it looks like it's adding a second thin space when creating the PDF… which results in spacing that amounts to about the width of a standard full-width space… The documentation indicates that this feature can be disabled by calling the polyglossia package with the '[autospacing=false]' option… something I will hopefully be able to verify tomorrow.
