I am writing a document in French using LaTeX and I found a weird behavior with paragraph spacing. Here is a MWE (in English):
\documentclass{article}
%\usepackage[french]{babel}
%\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\setlength{\parskip}{10ex plus 0.5ex minus 0.2ex}
\begin{document}
Test on a first paragraph. Here I list some things:
\begin{itemize}
\item One.
\item Two.
\item Three.
\end{itemize}
Another paragraph, is it? lorem lorem lorem lorem lorem lorem lorem
lorem lorem lorem lorem lorem lorem lorem lorem.
\end{document}
Note: I set a huge parskip in order to differentiate paragraphs.
When compiling this document, I get three groups: the first paragraph, the itemize and the second paragraph. However, when including babel with the french option, the result is different: One whole block (a single paragraph). What I would like is to have the second paragraph detached from the first one, i.e. with the appropriate parskip between them.
Question:
How can I separate these paragraphs?
Also, out of curiosity: What is the rule behind this rule implemented by babel? I realize that when including babel with a specific language option, some spacing rules change. For example, in french, one must put a space before the colon, question mark, among others. Not being a native french speaker, I was wondering what is the rule that supports this.
Best Answer
french typography has quite a lot specific requirements and frenchb.ldf tries to implement them. On of this rules is the list spacing. You can revert this by using
\frenchbsetup{ReduceListSpacing=false,CompactItemize=false}. More informations can be found in the babel documentation.