From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 07:15:38 EDT
On Monday, July 07, 2003 8:41 AM, Tex Texin <tex@i18nguy.com> wrote:
> Stefan,
> Thanks for your comments.
> Philippe,
> Thanks for your comments. I may add some of the notes to the page.
> However, I want to question your recommendation of U+2009 as I believe
> that is a breaking space. Perhaps you meant U+2007 Figure Space?
I can't make a recommandation on which space figure to use.
Ideally, it must just be *less wide* than a digit and *not justified*, it must
be *unbreakable*. The ideal space to use depends on the available fonts,
and in practive most texts are coded with NBSP (sometimes a standard
SPACE, but using simply nothing is better than using a SPACE), and the
final space is substituted during formatting before publishing.
> The comment of my own I may add, is that for some software
> applications, using
> these spaces may affect searching.
>
> With respect to your last comment:
> "With a space, a number like "123 456" is NEVER ambiguous for anyone...",
> the word "never" is too strong. For me it is very ambiguous, since it
> looks to me like two numbers. ;-)
My "anyone" relates to French readers. It's innaceptable to write two numbers
just separated by spaces, you need a punctuation sign:
=> "123,<standard space>456" means two numbers in French,
=> "123,456" means one decimal number.
The list separator in French is preferably the semicolon, rather than a comma
(which must then have a space):
=> "123<thin space>;<standard space>456"
The <thin space> is here also encoded accroding to the character encoding
constraints and fonts (here also less wide than a digit, unbreakable and
not justified).
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