https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41652

Simo Kaupinmäki <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[email protected]

--- Comment #7 from Simo Kaupinmäki <[email protected]> ---
It is easy to agree with Stfhell's notion that the intervening space in
expressions such as "Dr Freud" and "5 %" should be non-breaking, but I can't
quite see the reasoning behind it having to be of fixed width too. By similar
logic, shouldn't the spaces in "Sigmund Freud" and "five per cent" have fixed
width as well? I find it rather inconsistent that a non-breaking space, which
in non-justified text looks exactly like an average space, may stand out as
narrower than average if the text is justified. Can you point out an
authoritative source that actually recommends this? (Note that even in
justified text, the difference will only be discernible on some of the lines,
and in carefully typeset publications it should ideally not be discernible at
all because the variation between lines is minimized by using hyphenation.)

The French spacing applied in connection with certain punctuation is a little
different matter, as U+00A0 is mostly considered too wide for this purpose in
professional-level typography as far as I know. A more appropriate character
should be the narrow no-break space U+202F (though technical support for it may
still be lacking in some environments; for a detailed, though not necessarily
quite up-to-date discussion, see
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/595365/how-to-render-narrow-non-breaking-spaces-in-html-for-windows).

As regards abbreviations such as "i.e." the standard way to write these seems
to be without any space, at least as far as English is concerned:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/i.e.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/i.e.

So, in principle what my point boils down to is this: Is there actually a
legitimate need for a fixed-width no-break space that is _only_randomly_
distinguishable from a normal space in justified text? Sure, many people have
learned to expect that U+00A0 behaves like that, but from a professional
typographer's perspective this expectation may be misguided, and it is clearly
contradicted by the Unicode standard. (It may also be worth noting that Firefox
nowadays seems compliant with the Unicode in its rendering of U+00A0.)

That said, the approach suggested by Stfhell might indeed offer a practical
compromise, catering both for the Unicode-compliant view and the MS
Word-compliant view.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
_______________________________________________
Libreoffice-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice-bugs

Reply via email to