Hi, Recently, while setting up typographic conventions for the French newspaper I contribute to, I noticed an issue that affected en dashes (U+2013), but not em dashes (U+2014).
We collectively decided to use en dashes for parentheticals rather than em dashes, because of their limited size, improved readability over hyphen-minus, and Unicode "compliance". We also put a non-breaking space (U+00A0) inside the parenthetical and a regular space (U+0020) outside. Example, with "--" as an en dash: Nous mangions des pommes[SP]--[NBSP]les plus rouges au monde[NBSP]--[SP]sous les arbres. However, since en dashes are considered unambiguous hyphens (HH) in UAX #14, the tailorable line breaking rule LB12a means that there *can* be a line break after en dashes, even with a non-breaking space. LB21 also specifies that there shouldn't be a line break before HHs. This is a problem in our case, as we, like many other major French publications, use en dashes for parentheticals and therefore can't join the opening dash and the word after with a simple NBSP. This results in the opening dash being placed at the end of the line, which is undesirable. Em dashes are unaffected due to being categorized as B2 rather than HH. We eventually decided to resort to the WORD JOINER + NBSP combo, rather than falling back to em dashes--but it feels quite hacky. Therefore, I would like to suggest allowing breaks before the en dash character (U+2013), perhaps by moving the character from HH to B2 along with em dash. Regards, Léane Grasser PS. I tried to search this mailing list's archive up to 2014 and couldn't find a discussion regarding this very topic. Sorry in advance if it's already been discussed.
