Hi Léane,
I cannot really help with the technical issue, but I think the logic is
that traditionally it has been considered typographically bad to begin a
line with a parenthetical dash. The reasoning behind this seems to be
that: a) if you use a comma for parenthesis, you will also not start the
line with the leading comma:
... Nous mangions des pommes
, les plus rouges au monde, sous les arbres ...
b) A line starting with a dash gives you a more ragged impression of the
left margin, which ought to look straight. And c) A line starting with
a dash might look as if you were making a bullet point list:
– les plus rouges au monde,
– les plus vertes au monde ...
So this is the traditional printers’ rule, and I guess it was taken over
into Unicode.
But this is the logic of letterpress printing. It can evolve. When I
typeset texts, I also often favor logical line-breaks, disregarding
traditional typesetting rules. For example, traditionally, when
typesetting the heading of a chapter, one should not start a line with
“of”. So one ought to print:
The long and winding history of
typographical preferences
But nowadays I think not only I prefer to keep syntactic entities (in
this case, prepositional phrases) together:
The long and winding history
of typographical preferences
So there seems to be a trend towards syntactic logic that overrules the
old letterpress-printing rules. In other words, a trend towards making
it more important to use line breaks to help the reader understand the
concrete sentence than having a ‘clean’ layout of the page as a whole.
Your preference for the parenthetical dashes being on the same line as
the parenthesis fits into this, and I think Unicode should allow this.
Best wishes,
Daniel
--
Prof. Dr. Daniel Bunčić
===============================================================
Slavisches Institut der Universität zu Köln
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Homepage: http://daniel.buncic.de/
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ResearchGate: https://researchgate.net/profile/Daniel-Buncic-2
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