Support for indefinite article about acro HOT 8 CLOSED

Original comment by Clemens Niederberger (Bitbucket: cgnieder, GitHub: cgnieder).

Thanks for this one, too. I am hesitating to add this feature, though. In English the case is rather easy: two versions of indefinit articles. Compare this to German: “ein”, “eine”, “eines”, “einer”, “einen”, “einem”. Other languages are probably even worse. So implementing this feature in a language independent way will be a nightmare, even worse than the plural form which also is too inflexible as to serve as a real language independent feature. And as you are saying “Strictly speaking, one knows for \acs, \acl, and \acf which form is displayed”.

So while I like the idea in principle I probably won't add this to »acro«.

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Original comment by Bastian Sauert (Bitbucket: sauert, GitHub: sauert).

The point is that in English the short and the long form can have different indefinite articles (as they depend on the pronounciation, not on the spelling), for example: a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) but an SNR. However, \ac may display one form or the other (which is actually its job) so you can't tell which article to use.
Therefore, you always have to think every time you write an \ac{SNR} "was this the first time I used it?". Even worse, you might later add another usage beforehand (maybe in another chapter or maybe even by reordering chapters or sections), in which case you have to check and change it again. This is very errorprone and the reason why I requested that feature.

In contrast in German, the indefinite article is determined by the gender of the acronym (which mostly the gender of the last word of the compound AFAIK). This means that short and long form have the same article as they have the same gender and you don't need this feature at all. But even if they had different articles (I could not come up with an example though), it doesn't matter if there are two possible articles or six or twenty, as long as the article of the short and long form of each acronym is determined by the acronym, i.e., you can say "the short form of this acronym has this article and the long form has that one".

This concepts would break if the article is determined by something else than the acronym and its short or long form. Examples might be the position in the sentence or the ending of the word before. I don't know such a language, but that doesn't mean much. In any case, even this simple implementation would still help for English, which might be one of the most used languages in LaTeX.

I agree with you in two points:

1. In case there exist languages which need this feature but have more than two indefinite articles, the default article can seldomly be used. But, it is still reasonable to have one IMO.
2. My implementation is wrong for plural forms. In English you don't need a special handling (the indefinite article in plural form is always "some" independent of the pronounciation), so \iacp ... are just superfluous. In case a language needs it, one would probably need different options for singular and plural.

Concluding, I still think that this feature (for singular only) is very beneficial for English texts. Even if it's not needed for most (all?) other languages, this alone justifies its inclusion IMO.

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Original comment by Clemens Niederberger (Bitbucket: cgnieder, GitHub: cgnieder).

You have a point there. I'll open this issue again. (Must have been too late yesterday - I should have thought of this myself...)

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Original comment by Clemens Niederberger (Bitbucket: cgnieder, GitHub: cgnieder).

resolve issue #8

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Original comment by Bastian Sauert (Bitbucket: sauert, GitHub: sauert).

Thank you very much for implementing my request.

I have one question/remark though: Is ~ still an unbreakable space in LaTeX3? If so, I would like to suggest replacing it by a normal space or maybe a user-configurable macro (might be overkill, though). I don't see why there may not be a line-break between article and acronym.

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Original comment by Clemens Niederberger (Bitbucket: cgnieder, GitHub: cgnieder).

No, it isn't. In the expl3 environment all spaces are ignored. If you want a normal space there you add ~ and if you want an unbreakable space you have to explicitly use \nobreakspace.

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Original comment by Bastian Sauert (Bitbucket: sauert, GitHub: sauert).

Thanks for clarifying. In this case: 2 thumbs up for your solution!

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Original comment by Clemens Niederberger (Bitbucket: cgnieder, GitHub: cgnieder).

Removing version: 1.1 (automated comment)

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