Thomas Nielsen wrote:
>
>Martin Duerst wrote:
>>Unicode distinguishes hyphen and minus (besides having a generic
>>hyphen/minus), because in certain circumstances one might indeed
>>want to distinguish them and show them differently, although these
>>circumstances are rare and the distinction is definitely a burden on
>>the general user.
>
>Jonathan wrote:
>>>I was under the impression that in regular handwriting or print hyphen and
>minus
>>>look quite different. Only because of the severe limitations of 6 or 7 bit
>>>computer codes were they "merged" into a novelty that looks like neither.
The
>>>same was done to the two English single quotes and the apostrophe.
>>>With a 16 bit code the limitations and the necessity are gone.
>
>The distingushing between the minus and the hyphen plus em-dash, en-dash
>glyphs
>is very important for the publishing and typhographic world. Nobody in Europe
>would for example accept a minus character as a hyphen, but rather use a
>en-dash
>or em-dash (which is different for North-America and also varies within
>the same
>regions).
>Indeed Unicode solves this problem in an elegant way.
>
>
The problem, though, is that your average computer user isn't a
typographer (or a mathematician) and gets very vague about the
differences involved.
The Macintosh, for example, has had an em-dash (or is it an en-dash?) as
a part of its standard character set for the last twelve years -- and yet
most Mac users persist in using the hyphen as a dash or, if you're
particularly lucky, two hyphens.
Asking someone to make the proper distinctions between hyphen, minus,
hyphen/minus, em-dash, en-dash, and so on when all they're doing is
writing a quick letter to Aunt Sue -- it's hard.
(Not that I really disagree with you -- I think Unicode did the right
thing here. It's basically a problem of education and HI.)
John H. Jenkins
tseng@sj-coop.net
jenkins@apple.com
http://www.sj-coop.net/~tseng
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