From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Mon Mar 07 2005 - 12:26:27 CST
Doug Ewell schrieb:
> German and other languages where ligation depends on syllable or subword
> boundaries might apply dictionary lookup,
For languages where ligation depends on subword boundaries (e. g., German),
MS Word should treat the pertinent marker (“bedingter Trennstrich”, in
the German user interface; I don’t know the English equivalent; the hot
key is “Ctrl” + “-”) as both a possible hyphenation point and as a boundary
across which no ligation must take place. This could be easily implemented
by inserting a ZWNJ at every hyphenation point entered by the user, when
the text is sent to a rendering process, or stored in non-Word format.
This would make proper ligation feasable without dictionary lookup.
Of course, this also applies to other text processing software; it is just
so that I know MS-Word better.
Rationale:
In German, subword boundaries are the preferred hyphenation points:
<http://www.ids-mannheim.de/reform/f.html#P111>. Authors, and typists,
are supposed to prevent misleading hyphenations:
<http://www.ids-mannheim.de/reform/f.html#111E2>. Hence, many typists
have made a habit of marking the subword boundaries with “Ctrl” + “-”
(at least, I have done so). Only in very narrow columns, one would allow
a hyphenation at a non-subword (but syllable) boundary, as those additional
hyphenation points tend to mislead the reader. Example, actually seen in
“Das große Haus- und Familienbuch der Spiele” by Robert E Lembke: “Radiosen-
dung” – never heard of “Radiosen”, they are not even in the encyclopaedia,
what might their dung look like – oh, now I see, that guy is discussing
a “Radio-Sendung” (radio broadcast).
Wrong ligation is much less conspicuous than wrong hyphenating, and many
fonts don’t do ligation, anyway; hence, it would be difficult to educate
typists to include explicit ZWNL to prevent wrong ligations.
Furthermore, there is no reason to mark, on data entry, subword boundaries
twice: for hyphenation, and for non-ligation, respectively. On the contrary,
there is orthographic, and typographic, reason to mark them just once
(for both hyphenating and non-ligation).
Word knows which parts of a document are in German; the rendering process
(or a plain text file) has no information about the language (or not
normally). Hence, Word should apply this information to enable proper
ligatures, if the font has the pertinent glyphs.
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
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