From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Fri Nov 26 2004 - 16:50:04 CST
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
> If encoding ligation oportunity is not plain-text, why then have it in
> Unicode?
> If hyphenation opportunity is not plain-text, why then have it in
> Unicode?
Both of these capabilities are arguably plain-text. There is such a
thing as over-using them to the point where you have crossed the line
into markup. This is probably an aesthetic judgment.
> Nobody is required to use them, but if one wants to do it for better
> rendering of prepared documents, why would Unicode forbid it? Was my
> question really so stupid?
You really don't see anything wrong with inserting 5 formatting
characters in an 8-letter word?
If you are feeding your plain text into a system that is capable of
high-quality typography, such as InDesign, then it should generate
ff-type ligatures and perform sensible hyphenation by default. You can
then use ZWNJ to turn ligation *off* where it is not desired. Of course
you are not "forbidden" to go the other way, and mark every ff-ligature
and hyphenation point in your text, but it seems like overkill if you
are planning to use a high-end rendering system anyway.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 26 2004 - 16:51:41 CST