Re: soft hyphen

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>]

On Sun, 2003-04-27 at 20:43, Noah Levitt wrote:
> There's been a discussion on the linux-utf8 mailing list
> about U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN. Unicode 4.0 changes the
> character's General Category from Pd (Punctuation, Dash) to
> Cf (Other, Format). The consensus seems to be that SHY
> should be ignored, except as a suggestion for a hyphenation
> point. (It's not clear to me whether that's been true all
> along or is new with Unicode 4.0.) Pango seems to currently
> treat SHY as a regular non-word character. It always draws
> it. Since pango doesn't do hyphenation yet, I think it
> should always ignore SHY. Comments?

Yes, I think it was always intended to be just a suggestion for
a hyphenation point. So normally it shouldn't have a glyph.

If we add SOFT HYPHEN to the ZERO_WIDTH_CHAR() macro in 
modules/basic/basic-common.h then the glyph isn't shown for it.
(I'm not sure if there is a more correct way to do this.)


The other problem is that it is currently assumed to be a word break
(which messes up my hyphenation code, which needs the complete words
including any soft hyphens). I don't think changing the type to
'Other, Format' is going to help here. But I have a one-line patch to
break.c which fixes it.

(I've got soft hyphens working OK now!)

Damon