From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 16:11:22 EDT
On 06/08/2003 05:58, Jony Rosenne wrote:
>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.
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>Jony
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>>-----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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Point taken. But when different fonts and rendering engines give
different results because the standard is unclear or ambiguous, that is
a matter for the discussion here. And when conforming fonts and
rendering engines fail to give the required results, that may also be
because of a deficiency in the standard.
It seems that many rendering engines give to the sequence space,
combining mark the width normally assigned to a space. Is this actually
what the standard suggests? I have identified a need to display
combining marks with no extra width, only the width required by the
mark. Should the sequence space, combining mark do what I want, or
shouldn't it? If so, this needs to be spelled out so that rendering
engines know what they are supposed to do. If not, there may be a need
for a new character. This is a deficiency in the standard, not in the
rendering engines.
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
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