From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Well, Philippe, the same might apply equally for plain M.<fixed width space>Verdy, so it is not an aristocratic privilege. But (and this is in answer to S�amas as well) this wasn't originally my suggestion, it was Ernest's, who wrote:
I disagree. Surely there is something SEMANTICALLY different about the
space in "Louis XVI". One semantic difference is that it is
non-breaking. But another one is that these words should not be split
apart. An additional semantic distinction might be that they should be
treated as one word for the purposes of word breaking algorithms.
Are there such semantics for common people names and first names and titles? A bas les privil�ges! coupons la t�te � ces id�es pr�con�ues! Kings and other nobility don't need special treatments, because authors will argue that they insist their full name not being splitted or broken across lines. Same thing for trademarks and company names like "Vivendi Universal", or why not on country names like "Sri Lanka", which are considered unbreakable as each part of the compound word have equal importance...
Here what I mean is that if one wants to really avoid line breaks or extra word spacing, this is part of a style decision, but not part of the plain-text itself. If you mean that we need a "SPACE LETTER" to avoid this extra inter-word spacing or word breaking or line breaks, may be this could simply be added with a space having a "Lo" general category (and that may be useful as thre base for isolated diacritics that may appear in the middle of words, for example a apostrophe diacritic on top of this space letter).
I would not militate for describing a specific handling of nobility names in Unicode.
The main usage is with compound words such as "ice cream" or "Louis XIV" or commercial phrases such as "Camry SE" where for esthetic reasons an author would prefer that the space not expand upon justification, so as to emphasize the compound nature of the word
I simply changed Louis XIV to Louis XVI to bring in the connotations of chopping off heads. I disagree with Ernest about ice cream. But maybe no typographers actually want to do this. I did suggest that fixed width spaces might look better in Bible book names and some other places, but I am not a typographer and so don't claim to know exactly how things should be set.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
