Re: Proposing mostly invisible characters

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 14:53:45 +0200 (CEST)
Christoph Päper via Unicode <unicode_at_unicode.org> wrote:

> Dear Unicoders
>
> There are some characters that have no precedent in existing
> encodings and are also hard to attest directly from printed sources.
> Can one still make a solid case for encoding those in Unicode?
>
> I am thinking of characters that are either invisible (most of the
> time) or can become invisible under certain circumstances.
> - INVISIBLE HYPHEN (IHY) or ZERO-WIDTH HYPHEN (ZWH)
> is *never* rendered as a hyphen,
> *but* the word it appears in is treated as if it contained one at
> its position.

SOFT HYPHEN is supposed to be rendered in the manner appropriate to the
writing system, not necessarily like a HYPHEN. In some writing
systems, such as, I gather, most very modern Lao writing systems, it
has no visual indication. TUS claims that I was hallucinating when I
saw word wrapping hyphens in non-scriptio continua Pali in the Tai
Tham script in a Lao book. (To put it less provocatively, one needs
user-level control of the rendering of soft hyphens.)

So, to make a proper case for INVISIBLE HYPHEN, you at least need
evidence of a contrast between soft-hyphen and an invisible hyphen.
Even then, you run the risk of being told that you should use a higher
level protocol which you will have to implement yourself. Also, so
long as you don't need your text to be automatically split into words,
you can use ZWSP for the function.

Richard.
Received on Thu Sep 12 2019 - 09:30:16 CDT