From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 16:35:46 EDT
Ken Whistler posted:
> Of course a standard which mandates space folding is also
> within its rights to mandate, for example, the non-use of
> nonspacing marks applied to SPACE characters. It can simply
> rule out such sequences as valid for its context, in which
> case the problem goes away.
And for such standards or applications one can usually use U+00A0
NO-BREAK SPACE to force multiple spacings.
One can also use this followed by a non-spacing combining character to
call for rendering of that combining character in isolation.
My feeling is that because of the special qualities of regular SPACE
using NBSP (U+00A0) should be the more robust way to go.
Essentially, since the Unicode specifications say that a non-spacing
diacritic can be applied to any base character, including the spaces, it
is up to fonts and other presentation software to support this and to
try to make the results look good according to othrographic and cultural
expectations, just as it is with any text coded in Unicode.
Sometimes fonts don't do this. I would not at all be surprised to find
for example that _g_ followed by U+0325 COMBINING RING BELOW would come
out with the combining ring overlapping the tail of the _g_ unless I
were using a font especially designed for linguistic use.
I would not be at all surprised that some fonts and display devices
wouldn't justify NBSP + COMBINING DOT BELOW at the beginning of a line.
But good typographical fonts should justify such combinations and should
presumably change the width of NBSP when appropriate.
Such changes of width and shapes are what one finds with ligatures in
fonts that support ligatures.
Jim Allan
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