On 15/09/2004 04:02, Peter Constable wrote:
...
IIRC, the scenario of IL *not* followed by a combining mark was not one
explicitly discussed by the proposers before preparing their proposal. I
would consider it a possibility that the advance width could be in
proportion to the width of the combining mark; it might be considered a
logical extension of that idea to say that the advance width could
reduce to 0 in the event the maximum width of marks combining with the
IL were 0 (i.e. there are no visible combining marks), but that was not
a specific intent of the proposal.
The particular case when a reduction to zero width would be especially
appropriate is when INVISIBLE LETTER is used with a *spacing* combining
mark, so that this can be displayed in isolation, with no leading space
i.e. correctly aligned with a margin or column. This is particularly
necessary in tables of alphabets etc, in which all of the characters in
a writing system, including those which Unicode has defined as spacing
combining marks, are displayed in a table. (Yes, correct display of
tables is outside the scope of plain text, but it is not the job of
markup to delete extra space which has been generated by Unicode.)
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
