Philippe Verdy wrote: > Spacing diacritics are not "on the edge" of the standard,
The "edge" I was speaking of was the requirement for the exact display width of a nonspacing diacritic on top of a SPACE to be specifiable in some determinant way. > when they > are already given a full block and handled there as symbols (not as > letters as suggested in some parts of UAX's), with their own identity > independant of their actual glyphic representation. I am not > discussing about the typesetting of these grapheme clusters but > really about the textual semantics of such combining sequences > with an invisible base character, affecting all their properties and > not fully described in the various standard annexes. In case you didn't notice, I was responding to Peter Kirk's note -- not to yours. > Due to the > huge legacy use of SPACE+diacritics in legacy text, and the > already normative parts of some standard annexes, it will be hard > to correct the behavior or change the text of these annexes. Um, yes. > And it's where a new better base character than SPACE could > help solve cleanly the ambiguities. Um, no. Precisely because it would introduce *another* way to do what is already specified in the standard. It would, I predict, lead to nothing but more trouble. You might, perhaps, find it satisfying, but I can guarantee that there would then be a future critic complaining about an unnecessary distinction introduced into the standard. And then there would be *more* text in different places of the standard to try to correct and change, in an attempt to try to make consistent distinctions between the behavior of <SPACE, NSM> and <ACCENT_ANCHOR, NSM>. --Ken
