https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41652
--- Comment #9 from stfhell <stfh...@googlemail.com> --- (In reply to comment #7) > 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? Typesetting conventions are conventions, not ISO standards, and they vary with language and time and personal taste. I can direct you to the orthographic German "Duden" (following DIN 5008 for letter-writing): With office documents and e-mails use a space after abbreviation dots (z. B., u. a. m.), but not in dates (05.07.06); in word processing use a small fixed-width space in both abbreviations and dates. (What merriam-webster.com and oxforddictionaries.com do is compatible with _English_ typesetting practise and with common writer's practise, because it's the easiest way to prohibit a line break.) Spaces before/after/around symbols like $ % & / « » vary a lot, but in typesetting handbooks you usually find recommendations like 1/6 or 1/8 or 0 em quad. A full and proportional space would be regarded as unprofessional typesetting in Germany. In typesetting systems, users have fixed-width spaces of all sizes (including the normal inter-word size of about 1/4 quad) for all kinds of usages (space between chapter number and title; aligning numbers like "347" and "_47" vertically; insert a space at paragraph end to avoid the last line being fully justified). They are "tools" for laying out text, not necessarily a way to encode text as information - typesetters use such things as double 1/4 quad spaces. So fixed-width variants of normal space size do have a use (and Unicode defines them: U+2002, U+2004, U+2005 etc.). The important point is not that the fixed-width space should be distinguishable in all cases, but that it should not be extensible with proportional spacing. In good typography such spaces should in most cases be smaller than the regular space (as you say). And, of course, you are right in that U+00A0 is _not_ defined as fixed-width. And Microsoft knows that: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/spaces.htm But designing fonts and designing word processors are different things for Microsoft. Offering Word users a submenu with various types of spaces would be overkill for most users, and Microsoft has decided to offer them the fixed-width normal space as a single "compromise" alternative. Whether from the need to be downward-compatible with pre-Unicode documents, from misinterpretation of the Unicode standards or from conscious design principles. (Word processors are in fact used as modern typewriters, people don't want to fiddle with half a dozen spaces, and many don't even bother with hard spaces.) In a world where only recent versions of Firefox render U+00A0 correctly, where Adobe epub-reader software cannot render a soft hyphen correctly and the most commonly used word processor renders all spaces apart from U+0020 and U+00A0 as boxes if the font doesn't define them (LibreOffice uses the glyphs from a substitution font), you cannot just follow Unicode standards blindly without regard to compatibility issues. But of course there is other software than MS Word. InDesign imports Unicode spaces well from DOC files, and LibreOffice shouldn't let itself be limited by a word processor with modest formatting capabilities. (In InDesign, imported U+00A0 are rendered correctly. Thin spaces are fixed-width, as far as I know, in line with common typesetting practise.) But it should be a conscious decision of the user to depart from Word conventions on a per-document basis. The problem is: What space could be used for fixed-width spaces (for which there is also a definite need) if you tick that future LO box "Treat hard space as proportional"? -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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