Re: SOFT HYPHEN

[Klaus Weide <kweide@enteract.com>]

On Tue, 9 Nov 1999, Markus Kuhn wrote:

> 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.

It's not just the Unicode consortium that views things that way, but
apparently also the authors of RFC 2070 and W3C.

Lynx (where not broken) implements SHY according to RFC 2070.

I asume you are familiar with the dissenting treatise at
<http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html>?

> 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.

At *that* level (i.e. between application and terminal emulator, and
maybe between application and curses library), that's probably the
right thing.  But that's not the only level people on this list are
concerned about (e.g. what about an editor reading in a file).

 Klaus

-
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/