ANSI (and therefore Unicode) has the soft hyphen (U+00AD), which is a
normally zero-width character that can be used as a hyphenation point.
This is designed to fulfill your second request.
ZWJ has different semantics from a "don't hyphenate here" (ZWDH)
character, which is used to overrule hyphenation algorithms. ZWJ is
used to control joining of cursive fonts, and in principle might allow
hyphenation at such a point. I can't find any Unicode character that
means "don't hyphenate here", but I have found such a character to be
useful in word processing. It would be possible to mark such a
relationship using parallel rich text, but that does seem to be heavy
weight. In view of the presense of similar kinds of punctuation
symbols, e.g., ZWJ and ZWNJ, I think it would make sense to add a ZWDH
character to Unicode.
Murray
>-----Original Message-----
>From: unicode@Unicode.ORG [SMTP:unicode@Unicode.ORG]
>Sent: Monday, January 06, 1997 10:28 AM
>To: unicode@Unicode.ORG
>Subject: FW: Hyphenation Points
>
>I am forwarding this on for Mr. Raner.
>Steve
>
>>----------
>>From: Mirko Raner[SMTP:raner@mathema.de]
>>Sent: Saturday, January 04, 1997 10:20 AM
>>To: unicode-inc@Unicode.ORG
>>Cc: miwi@borel.mathema.de
>>Subject: Hyphenation Points
>>
>>Dear Ladies,
>>Dear Gentlemen,
>>
>>our company is currently developing a Unicode-conforming word-processing
>>application. Especially for the process of hyphenation we have encountered
>>some
>>problems:
>>
>>1. How can we prohibit a hyphenation at a certain position in a word?
>> Sometimes it can be necessary to insert a special character eg in order
>> to prevent the hyphenation algorithm from splitting some proper name at a
>> wrong position.
>> We thought about using the ZERO WIDTH JOINER (U+200C) to achieve this,
>>but
>> we are not sure if this is allowed (as the ZWJ obviously has slightly
>> different semantics).
>>
>>And even more important:
>>
>>2. How can hyphenation at a certain position be forced?
>> Our idea is to insert a "hint character" at which a word is hyphenated
>>when
>> it is split due to line boundaries; the user might want to prescribe the
>> hyphenations of a word manually. Unicode provides several hyphen
>>characters,
>> but the one we need, is an invisible (zero-width) character which simply
>> tells the hyphenation algorithm to hyphenate after this position (if
>> hyphenation is necessary).
>>
>>Help on how to solve these problems will surely be appreciated.
>>
>>Thank you very much in advance.
>>
>>Best regards,
>>
>>Mirko Raner
>>Software Developer
>>MATHEMA Software GmbH
>>Germany
>>
>>
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