From: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin (antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt)
Date: Sun Mar 28 2004 - 12:02:40 EST
On 2004.03.27, 11:12, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>>> This becomes evident when composing with extra-space between
>>> letters: there is no "tie" between the first "L" and the dot.
>
> Interesting comment, because I had always thought that this
> middle-dot was a modifier of the previous L,
That was apparently the whole idea behind the first implementation of
this chararcter. (Where does it come from? MacWestern? No ISO:8859
covers it, AFAIK.)
> and I didn't think about syllabic hyphenation.
Your're not supposed to. But people creating encoding should have done
more than just grab glyphs from assorted text. (Too bad that the few
people who can do it seriously are not rewarded for it...)
>>> Using this character for Catalan texts additionally causes
>>> hyphenation problems.
>
> So what would be the "hyphenation problems"?
Something happends when the "L·L" coincides with a soft line end. I'm
no expert in Catalan typesetting but IIRC the dot becomes a hyphen,
while regular "LL"s cannot be broken.
I could ask about this in Catalonia, as also many of us, bvut it falls
outside the scope of Unicode.
> Also what is the normal placement of the middle-dot after a
> uppercase L letter, doesn't it kern into the space above the
> horizontal bar?
Kerning is kerning, right. What is the normal placement of a "V" after
an "A", or a "º" after a "."?... Thsey are separate characters, and
kerning is not a matter for Unicode.
> If I understand what you say here, that it's not a diacritic that
> modifies that first L,
Yes, it is not.
> so that this middle-dot is effectively a orthographic hyphen similar
> in essence to other orthographic hyphens that are used to create
> compound words, or to mark the inversion of the verb and pronominal
> subject
More or less, yes. But while this kind of hyphens and apostrophes
separate two "words", the Catalan middle do between two "L"s does not.
> But in that case, is that middle-dot to be considered as a regular
> punctuation mark in Catalan?
More like a letter, from a typography point of view.
> Which category would you use to describe this character,
> independantly of the current assignment of U+00B7?
Something that does not counts "Paral·lel" as two words (while
"j’aime" or "it’s" may be two words), nor uses the middle dot for
cursor stop point when goind Ctrl+arrow et c.
-- ____.
António MARTINS-Tuválkin | ()|
<antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt> |####|
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