On 06/06/2012 08:11 PM, Stephan Stiller wrote:
Hi Philippe,
Thanks for your opinion. The examples I've just checked looked like
"zero-width or almost so" (Friedl) and "very narrow" (in a Japanese
dictionary, ISBN 978-4-7674-2315-9) to me. I am pretty sure I've seen
zero-width with either kana or romaji, just can't find a reference
right now. I think there are use instances. What "should" be done is
also a good question, and perhaps the answer isn't as obvious as I
thought, but these considerations make me wonder whether a font is
really free to make a choice about zero-width or not for any given
Unicode symbol. If not, I'm wondering whether Unicode
could/should/does make that binary decision. And in either case I'm
wondering for /which/ characters in Unicode zero-width is an option
(or obligatory).
Besides the fact that font designers can and will do exactly as they
please... Even if Unicode does specify "non-zero width," a designer can
always make that arbitrarily small, as close to zero as we like. Some
character descriptions may *recommend* features for the font designer,
mostly to clarify what the character is that the codepoint is meant to
represent.
Though I can see that maybe when Unicode specifies "zero-width" it
really should be and programs need to be able to rely on that.
~mark
