Re: Whitespace rules (v2)

Liam Quin (liamquin@interlog.com)
Sun, 24 Aug 1997 17:26:32 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Rick Jelliffe wrote:

> > From: Liam Quin <liamquin@interlog.com>
> > The hyphen is 0255 octal (173 decimal). It is a hyphen, not a soft hyphen.
> > There is no soft hyphen in Latin 1.
> > I don't have the necessary copy of Unicode in front of me,
>
> In both Unicode 1.0 and Unicode 2.0 &#x00AD; is called "soft hyphen"
> or "discretionary hyphen", so it is available, but perhaps not reliably
> supported by 8859-1 applications.

Not supported at all would be a fairer way to put it!
At any rate not by _conforming_ 8859-1 applications, as far as I
understand it... in the same way that most SGML applications don't
treat &x; as a syntax error even when it's illegal in ISO C or FORTRAN :-)

I don't have a copy of 8859 any more to check, but if the hyphen chracter
is to be treated as a soft hyphen, there's no way to type a hard hyphen...

> Also available is the zero-width space &#x200B;
> For example, supercali&#x200B;fragalistic&x200B;expialladocious.

Perhaps, but to claim that this is more readable to humans than
supercali&softhy;fragalistic&softhy;expialladocious.
would be absurd. If you hadn't omitted the # in the 2nd reference, the
length would have been the same too. Using &hy; is even better.

You can always do
<!--* hy: soft (discretionary) hyphenation point: *-->
<!Entity hy '&#x200B;'>

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin --  the barefoot typographer -- Toronto
lq-text: freely available Unix text retrieval


email address: liamquin, at host: interlog dot com