From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 11:08:38 EDT
From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> Ben Dougall scripsit:
>
> > why is it not categorised as white space then? or is it? doesn't look
> > like it is to me, but i'm not sure how to actually find out for sure.
>
> Well, um, it's not white: there is a dot in it.
Not really, in many applications it will translate in one or more dots just to create a dotted line (notably within layout processors for publishing). This looks more like a "styled" thin whitespace, and semantically it really has this value (the number of dots is not really relevant).
For example I would not be shocked if a text using it was rendered with a monospaced font, where the base line of the character cell shows multiple tiny dots, that create a contiguous dotted line when multiple U+2024 characters (one per display cell) are used to indent the text in columns.
Of course with proportional fonts this character would display at least (and preferably) a single dot. Any use of this character that ssumes it is a symbol consisting in a dingle dot aligned on the baseline seems to abuse the semantic of this character, which is not a punctuation, but really a styling character used instead of an "invisible" thin space.
In the case of a full justification, the number of dots in the leader is not relevant too...
The name may be confusing, I would have prefered ONE-DOT LEADERS.
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