Re: SOFT HYPHEN

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

SOFT HYPHEN is a good example where cultural backgrounds of various
groups clash together: The Unicode consortium is clearly primarily a
group of advanced WYSIWYG word processor manufacturers (Word, FramMaker,
etc.), while ISO JTC1 is concerned with a much wider range of often
simpler applications, including classic I/O devices such as printers and
video terminals. For these, it is desirable to not treat the SHY as a
special invisible magic character that has to be rendered based on its
position relative to line terminators. For xterm, I highly recommend to
treat everything that the Unicode standard defines beyond ISO 10646 with
care and scepticism, because it repeatedly became very clear that the
authors of the Unicode standard were NOT concerned about the problems of
terminal emulators and think only in terms of routines that format
entire strings or even paragraphs in one go without intermediate states
and partial rendering.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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