https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41652
--- Comment #13 from Simo Kaupinmäki <[email protected]> --- (In reply to comment #12) We all more or less seem to agree that the rendering of U+00A0 as a fixed-width space is basically a bug. Therefore it is a somewhat perverted situation that the bug cannot simply be fixed without paying attention to how the incorrect behaviour can also be preserved. Is it actually worth the trouble? I am not saying that it is a complete waste of time and effort, but this is a question that deserves to be asked too. It was not me who brought up that there are a variety of fixed-width spaces in Unicode. Nevertheless, as we are discussing whether or not U+00A0 should continue to be rendered as a fixed-width space, at least optionally, we should try to understand the background to and reasoning behind these standardized fixed-width spaces (and why U+00A0 is not one of them). Sure, some of them are still relevant today, but unquestionably some are redundant (U+2000 and U+2001 are canonically equivalent to U+2002 and U+2003 respectively). And then there are some the relevance of which can be questioned as far as modern typesetting practices are concerned. However, nobody has suggested that the redundant or possibly archaic Unicode characters need not be handled correctly. That is not the issue here. There are many redundant, archaic and even deprecated characters in Unicode, for which the main motivation is historical. People who want to use these characters for whatever reason in their documents should certainly have the option to do so, even if it may not always be the most elegant or technically reliable choice in digital typesetting. > > Using the Unicode > > fixed-width spaces for manual justifying in digital typesetting would be > > awkward and anachronistic. > there is no > other way to define the spacing you want but in the form of glyphs. I'm afraid you may have missed my point, so I'll try to clarify. The example was about how text used to be _justified_ manually. Historically, to achieve this effect you would have applied specific space values between words on each line. This was in fact one of the main uses for the various space values in manual typesetting. Today, however, if you want spacing on each line to be even, you simply specify that the text should be justified and let your application software automatically adjust the width of spaces accordingly. There is no point in using various fixed-width spaces for this purpose anymore. Historically, the first line of a paragraph would have been indented about one em space. Today, rather than inserting U+2003 (or U+2001), you can specify a fixed indentation value that will automatically be applied at the beginning of each paragraph. There is no need for a specific glyph there anymore. Historically, certain punctuation, such as a sentence-ending period, would have been followed by an em space or a couple of three-per-em spaces. Today this is often regarded old-fashioned, but people who still want to follow the tradition simply tend to type two (or even three?) regular spaces after the period. Sure, a purist could insert a U+2003 or a couple of U+2004s instead, but I fail to see how this would make any significant improvement from a typographical point of view. Yes, you can continue to use all the standard fixed-width spaces if you want to, but this is what you choose to do and it does not make the _software_ anachronistic. When using a word processor, my father, who is in his late seventies, still tends to break lines manually by tapping the return key at the end of each line, and he may also hyphenate the last word on a line by inserting a regular hyphen (U+002D) before the line break. This is because his paradigm of typing is of a different era. He does not take full advantage of the modern technology (in fact he still prefers a mechanical typewriter occasionally) – and that's fine, since he is retired and mostly writes for his own pleasure every now and then. But for the rest of us it is good to know that today there are more elegant methods of typing a piece of text. As regards French spacing in « Bonjour ! », inserting a non-breakable thin space before or after the punctuation marks may be a practical solution at the present time, but there are in fact alternative methods for this too. Smart font technology, as exemplified by "Linux Libertine G" and "Linux Biolinum G" fonts (already bundled with the recent versions of LibreOffice, even on Windows), allows automatic application of French spacing where deemed appropriate. There is no need to insert a specific space character, as LibreOffice is able to recognize the guillemets, exclamation marks, question marks etc. and take care of proper spacing by making use of additional instructions incorporated in the font itself. Unfortunately the technology is far from being universally supported (and there are several alternative ways to incorporate similar features), but with the right combination of font technology and application software it is quite functional. For more information on this technology, see: http://numbertext.org/linux/ http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=projects&item_id=graphite_home&_sc=1 This kind of smart font technology could also offer an elegant way to make available the optional fixed-width U+00A0, were this feature considered important enough to be incorporated in a font. The feature would then be available in any application software able to support the font technology, and being an optional feature of the font it could be applied to any portion of a text, rather than to the document as a whole. On the downside, it would only be available with some specific fonts. This might also be criticized as an excessively sophisticated approach to implement a feature that is basically non-standard. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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