On Thu, 17 Jan 2019 04:51:57 +0100 Marcel Schneider via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> Also, at least one French typographer was extremely upset > about Unicode not gathering feedback from typographers. > That blame is partly wrong since at least one typographer > was and still is present in WG2, and even if not being a > Frenchman (but knowing French), as an Anglophone he might > have been aware of the most outstanding use case of NNBSP > with English (both British and American) quotation marks > when a nested quotation starts or ends a quotation, where > _‘ ”_ or _“ ’_ and _’ ”_ or _” ’_ are preferred over the > unspaced compounds (_‘”_ or _“’_ and _’”_ or _”’_), at > least with proportional fonts. There's an alternative view that these rules should be captured by the font and avoid the need for a spacing character. There is an example in the OpenType documentation of the GPOS table where punctuation characters are moved rightwards for French. This alternative conception hits the problem that mass market Microsoft products don't select font behaviour by language, unlike LibreOffice and Firefox. (The downside is that automatic font selection may then favour a font that declares support for the language, which gets silly when most fonts only support that language and don't declare support.) Another spacing mess occurs with the Thai repetition mark U+0E46 THAI CHARACTER MAIYAMOK, which is supposed to be separated from the duplicated word by a space. I'm not sure whether this space should expand for justification any more often than inter-letter spacing. Some fonts have taken to including the preceding space in the character's glyph, which messes up interoperability. An explicit space looks ugly when the font includes the space in the repetition mark, and the lack of an explicit space looks illiterate when the font excludes the leading space. Richard.