From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 14:05:43 EDT
John Cowan posted:
> Not really, in many applications it will translate in one or more dots
> just to create a dotted line (notably within layout processors for
> publishing). This looks more like a "styled" thin whitespace, and
> semantically it really has this value (the number of dots is not really
> relevant).
>
> For example I would not be shocked if a text using it was rendered with
> a monospaced font, where the base line of the character cell shows
> multiple tiny dots, that create a contiguous dotted line when multiple
> U+2024 characters (one per display cell) are used to indent the text in
> columns.
>
> Of course with proportional fonts this character would display at least
> (and preferably) a single dot. Any use of this character that assumes
> it is a symbol consisting in a single dot aligned on the baseline seems
> to abuse the semantic of this character, which is not a punctuation,
> but really a styling character used instead of an "invisible" thin
> space.
Where is this behavior indicated by Unicode specifications?
Such behavior appears to me to be a non-standard extension on Unicode,
interpreting what Unicode classes as a General Puncutation character as
instead a Formatting Character.
Individual applications can do such things as they wish as part of a
higher protocol.
But I don't see how conforming aplications could assume this semantic
for the character when reading in plain text Unicode or writing plain
text Unicode.
What then is U+2025 TWO DOT LEADER?
Are there any other characters in Unicode that are *expected* to stretch
in size and produce multiple images?
Jim Allan
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