Earlier he wrote:The list separator in French is preferably the semicolon, rather than a comma (which must then have a space): => "123<thin space>;<standard space>456" The <thin space> is here also encoded accroding to the character encoding constraints and fonts (here also less wide than a digit, unbreakable and not justified).
In strict historic English typography, the unbreakable whitespaces before punctuations are often smaller (sixth of cadratin) and that's why they are often missed in ASCII-only text.
I wonder if here we are confusing character encoding with adjustments which should be made during rendering and typesetting - and which perhaps in the days of hot metal were made by including thin spacers. Are you really suggesting that the huge quantities of text in English, French and other languages, in ASCII and Unicode, are actually wrongly encoded, because there is almost invariably no character code for a thin space before punctuation? Surely it would be much more sensible to accept that this text is correctly encoded, and leave it to the text rendering or typesetting process to adjust the position of punctuation marks as appropriate.
I can just imagine the horrendous consequences for scripts like Hebrew and Arabic if the principle is established that a variety of thin spaces etc should be encoded in the text to indicate the typographically ideal exact positioning of each small glyph.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
