On Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:08:52 +0000 James Kass via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> On 2019-04-26 11:08 PM, Doug Ewell via Unicode wrote: > > This is a small percentage of the number of fonts that have all > > four of these Armenian glyphs, but show the abbreviation mark as a > > spacing glyph. It looks like Unicode is right, Wikipedia is right, > > and the fonts are wrong. > If the Wikipedia page(s) are correct, then Unicode isn't. Unicode > charts don't show the glyph on the dotted circle and the canonical > combining class is shown as "spacing". The fact that Doug Ewell > found some installed fonts displaying the character as a combining > mark suggests that the Wikipedia pages are correct. This character > is listed as being unused in modern Armenian, but you'd think that it > would have been exposed before now since the charcter has been in > Unicode since version 1.0. Well, ccc=0 is entirely permissible for non-spacing marks, though I find it an invitation to misspell words. I think the most important admissible issue is one of word boundaries. U+055F has line_break=alphabetic, but word_break=other. The latter doesn't seem very friendly towards spell checkers, but perhaps there is a good reason for it. Word_break=other is not compatible with being a non-spacing mark. Another important, but probably inadmissible, issue is that of the effect on editing. Life is easier if one can easily change the character preceding the abbreviation sign; this would often be difficult if the abbreviation sign were a combining mark. What advantages would accrue from changing U+055F from Po to Mn? Richard.
