Eric Muller wrote:
> > Should there be a distinction? If so, why?
>
> Because typographic borders often have different glyphs for each
> side. They could either align differently with other glyphs, or show
> different (typically symmetric) ink. I suppose you could argue that
> a layout engine should recognize when a U+2500 is used for a left
> side and when it is used for a right side, but that seems a bit too
> much for me.
A bit too much, agreed.
A common usage of the box drawing glyphs is to make forms. The
horizontal lines are used not only for the top and bottom, but also
for separation lines within the outer box. Similarly, the vertical
lines are used internally for columns. Should these glyphs also be
given different code points?
If non-standard, unaligned box drawing material was converted to
Unicode, it would be expected to display properly as long as the
font used was correctly aligned. One obvious issue would be
round-tripping. But, if non-standard material were being
converted to the standard, I'm trying to imagine why anyone
would want to convert it back to the original form.
Printed material has used many fancy borders, but somewhere
the line has to be drawn between what is a character and what
is a graphic.
> > If right/left are to be distinguished, what would happen if the
> > boxed text were RTL or bi-directional?
>
> Right/left are already distinguished, without me doing anything.
You are right and my bi-di question was a dumb one.
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Sep 04 2001 - 21:25:11 EDT