RE: Display of Isolated Nonspacing Marks (was Re: Questions on ZWNBS...)

From: Jony Rosenne (rosennej@qsm.co.il)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 08:58:28 EDT

  • Next message: Jon Hanna: "RE: Display of Isolated Nonspacing Marks (was Re: Questions on ZWNBS...)"

    I would like to point out that with all due respect, how particular fonts or rendering engines behave is only marginally relevant to the Unicode list. I think that we should deal only with the Unicode specification.

    A particular implementation or many implementations may not behave as expected, and then may be either conformant or non-conformant, or may behave as expected and still be either conformant or non-conformant. Messages such as the attached help the discussion of the specification only as illustrations and as a basis for discussing conformity.

    Jony

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
    > [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Peter Kirk
    > Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2003 12:11 PM
    > To: Curtis Clark
    > Cc: Unicode List
    > Subject: Re: Display of Isolated Nonspacing Marks (was Re:
    > Questions on ZWNBS...)
    >
    >
    > On 05/08/2003 16:59, Curtis Clark wrote:
    >
    > > on 2003-08-05 15:31 Peter Kirk wrote:
    > >
    > >> Thank you, Mark. This helps to clarify things, but still doesn't
    > >> explicitly answer my question of how to encode "a sentence
    > like "In
    > >> this language the diacritic ^ may appear above the letters
    > ...", but
    > >> instead of ^ I want to use a combining character" and want to
    > >> display exactly one space before the combining character - do I
    > >> encode two spaces or one?
    > >
    > >
    > > In this language the diacritic ĚŠ may appear above the letters...
    > >
    > > Two spaces, at least in Thunderbird Mail.
    > >
    > >
    > Thank you. Well, this sort of works. I looked in various
    > fonts. In some
    > of them the diacritic is centred in the space between the words
    > "diacritic" and "may", but in others it is offset to the left or the
    > right. The problem is that the space is wider than the
    > diacritic, which
    > confuses things, and all the more so no doubt if it expands for
    > justification. NBSP would probably be a better choice in that
    > it is less
    > likely to expand. But what I am looking for is a diacritic
    > holder which
    > is defined to be only as wide as the diacritic. On the principle that
    > base characters expand to fit the width of the diacritic, ZWSP or,
    > better, a real (rather than misnamed) zero width no break space would
    > seem to have the right properties for that.
    >
    > --
    > Peter Kirk
    > peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com
    > http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >



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