Re: Concerning the hyphen confusion in BiDi (was: Re: Bidirectional Bugs in Hebrew)

["Nadav Har'El" <nyh math technion ac il>]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2000, Owen Taylor wrote about "Re: Concerning the hyphen confusion in BiDi (was: Re: Bidirectional Bugs in Hebrew)":
>...
> The main difficulty with this approach is that users may be confused
> if HYPHEN and HYPHEN-MINUS look the same, but we can encourage font
> designers to avoid this - even in latin typography hyphens should
> generally be shorter than a MINUS sign, and may also be angled and/or
> slightly serifed.

Actually, in Hebrew a hyphen should be placed high (at the top-line of
the normal letters), while a minus is placed in the middle (as in English),
so there's a clear visible difference between them.

Because many existing implementations of Hebrew on computer don't have an
easy way of entering the hyphen (vs. the minus) character, many people in
Israel now use the same character for both hyphen and minus, but this is
regarded as bad typography, and books and newspapers still keep the hyphen
vs. minus (or dash, which is also in the middle) distinction.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Sunday, Nov 12 2000, 14 Heshvan 5761
nyh math technion ac il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Life's a bitch, but god forbid the bitch
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |divorce me -- Nas