From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Apr 01 2004 - 06:19:36 EST
On 01/04/2004 01:52, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
>
>
>>I disagree. Surely there is something SEMANTICALLY different about the
>>space in "Louis XVI". One semantic difference is that it is
>>non-breaking. But another one is that these words should not be split
>>apart. An additional semantic distinction might be that they should be
>>treated as one word for the purposes of word breaking algorithms.
>>
>>
>
>Are there such semantics for common people names and first names and titles?
>A bas les privilèges! coupons la tête à ces idées préconçues!
>Kings and other nobility don't need special treatments, because authors will
>argue that they insist their full name not being splitted or broken across
>lines. Same thing for trademarks and company names like "Vivendi Universal", or
>why not on country names like "Sri Lanka", which are considered unbreakable as
>each part of the compound word have equal importance...
>
>Here what I mean is that if one wants to really avoid line breaks or extra word
>spacing, this is part of a style decision, but not part of the plain-text
>itself. If you mean that we need a "SPACE LETTER" to avoid this extra inter-word
>spacing or word breaking or line breaks, may be this could simply be added with
>a space having a "Lo" general category (and that may be useful as thre base for
>isolated diacritics that may appear in the middle of words, for example a
>apostrophe diacritic on top of this space letter).
>
>I would not militate for describing a specific handling of nobility names in
>Unicode.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Well, Philippe, the same might apply equally for plain M.<fixed width
space>Verdy, so it is not an aristocratic privilege. But (and this is in
answer to Séamas as well) this wasn't originally my suggestion, it was
Ernest's, who wrote:
>The main usage is with compound words such as "ice cream" or
>"Louis XIV" or commercial phrases such as "Camry SE" where for
>esthetic reasons an author would prefer that the space not expand
>upon justification, so as to emphasize the compound nature of the
>word
>
I simply changed Louis XIV to Louis XVI to bring in the connotations of
chopping off heads. I disagree with Ernest about ice cream. But maybe no
typographers actually want to do this. I did suggest that fixed width
spaces might look better in Bible book names and some other places, but
I am not a typographer and so don't claim to know exactly how things
should be set.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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