Typography Style Guide

[Pentarctagon]

Given that issues have consistently come up related to following Wesnoth's Typography Style Guide, I felt it made sense to open this thread to ask a couple questions:

1. Is anyone opposed to following those guidelines?
2. If no, is anyone opposed to adding a CI check to validate, at least as much as possible, that those guidelines are being followed? (#7967)

Mainly what seems to be happened fairly regularly is either that changes get committed that don't follow the guidelines and then months later a bunch of them are fixed at once which then causes those strings to become fuzzy for translators, or the issues are noticed while reviewing the PR because only one or two people are consistently reviewing the text of PRs to try and catch these.

[Soliton]

Not opposed, didn't check everything in detail though. Being consistent is a good thing and if there are details that are not useful the guide can be adjusted.

The more that can be checked automatically the better.

[doofus-01]

1. "Opposed" is maybe too strong a word, but I don't have much respect for policing the subtleties of hyphen length or "non-standard" spacing after full stop. Grammar and spelling are important, as is enabling special characters for non-English text (in any context). But if it isn't a symbol on the keyboard, it's on the displaying program to auto-correct. Otherwise, it's a needless complication and waste of precious time.
2. Standardization is certainly worth something, and if there is some easy script, like wmlindent, that can automate the style-guide corrections, then no problem. If I have to think about em dash vs hyphen, I'm just going to avoid text changes. Maybe that's a good thing, but that's where I stand.

From looking at #7967, I don't know what to think. Maybe it's OK, I'll follow up there if I have anything useful to contribute.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

Regarding 1, I haven't read the style guide in detail recently, so don't take this as endorsement of the specific policies it prescribes. However, I think we should have a style guide and should endeavour to follow it consistently, even if I may disagree with some details here and there.

As a random example, I would personally prefer to use the ellipsis character instead of three periods. However, if the project has decided to use three periods, then we should do so consistently everywhere.

On to point 2, I think some of these rules simply cannot be automatically validated. I already mentioned elsewhere the example of the apostrophe / single quote issue – unless we decide never to use single quotes, we can't reliably determine with a script whether or not a given single quote preceded by a space is an apostrophe (and thus a "closing" quote) or an opening quote. I am not opposed to having a script that does its best to push the text into conformance, as long as there's some way to deal with the edge cases where it gets the wrong answer.