Re: Hyphenation Design (Was Re: Possible Pango 1.4 ideas)

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>]

On Tue, 2003-01-21 at 19:05, Noah Levitt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 18:52:15 +0000, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> > 
> > Normal hyphenation points have chars_to_remove set to 0,
> > pre_break_text set to "-", and post_break_text set to "".
> > 
> 
> I just want to point out that ‘-’ U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS
> probably isn't the right character to use as the hyphen. My
> *guess* is that ‘‐’ U+2010 HYPHEN is a better choice, for
> scripts that don't have their own special hyphens.

Yes, I did wonder about this. But if you use U+2010 HYPHEN how do you
expect users to type in hyphen characters in normal hyphenated text like
'up-to-date', and also minus characters for numbers? Do they have to
open an 'Insert Special Character' dialog to do one of them? Most will
probably just hit the '-' key in both cases.

Maybe applications are supposed to be clever enough to convert the
HYPHEN-MINUS characters typed in as 'up-to-date' into HYPHEN characters.
I don't know. But the Unicode spec (ch6, pg150) does seem to say HYPHEN
is correct.

 
> Another character to look at is U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN ‘­’
> (“SHY”). I'm not sure what this is for.

That's for users to specify possible hyphenation breaks. If the line
does break there, the hyphen is displayed, otherwise it is invisible
(from Unicode Standard Annex #14).

Damon