From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Thu May 22 2008 - 17:04:27 CDT
Asmus wrote:
> It may not technically change the meaning, but if you consider
> robustness of text interchange, you also need to consider how acceptable
> a fallback is to the average reader. I cannot gauge this reliably for
> this issue, but from what I read it seems that this is at least a
> borderline case, in the sense that from what people write, too much
> space (a full space) is a better fallback than none. If that's the case,
> then letting the user key in the encoding for the fallback presentation
> would be advantageous.
Is that what people 'write' (input) though? French emails cross my
screen from time to time, and I've never seen care taken in them to put
extra space before semicolons or colons etc. I strongly suspect that
most French people using typewriters did not insert spaces before
punctuation. And what percentage of French websites attempt to replicate
this feature of French typography?
This is a *typographic* convention that originates in the French
printing and publishing tradition. And it is worth preserving as long as
French typographers and readers consider it important. But whether
handled via an encoded space or through some other mechanism at the
display level, this is ultimately about document layout and
presentation, as conducted by professional typographers who know and
understand the rules (including, crucially, understanding how large the
space should be). In this context, I don't think the notion of
'acceptable fallback' is very relevant, because typography is all about
control, which is why professional page layout applications differ from
word processing tools: they provide a greater level of control in the
formatting and presentation of text.
Adam wrote:
> John likes to quote Borges and his famous
> "animal classification"*. In fact, the classification of writing marks
> as "characters" vs. "glyphs" is just a splendid example of that very
> problem.
Borges identifies the essentially arbitrary nature of classification,
but that's not to say that classification is useless. The distinction
between characters and glyphs is a functional one that follows a much
broader distinction between content and presentation that experience has
shown to be very useful in electronic document creation. I agree that
the boundary between text and typography, as between other kinds of
content and formatting, is not a completely clean one, but that doesn't
render the basic distinction useless, nor does it suggest that we
shouldn't try to maintain the distinction when looking at these kinds of
issues.
Philippe raised an issue specifically about the French UDHR documents as
provided at <http://www.unicode.org/udhr/>. Now I would say that all
these documents, whether plain text, XML, HTML or PDF are
typographically unformatted or, to put it another way, they are awaiting
typography. The XML and HTML obviously have some structural formatting,
which may be interpreted for presentation formatting, e.g. with bold
type for subheads, but none of these documents are what I would consider
typographically formatted. So I wonder to what degree it is sensible to
complain about the absence of space before certain punctuation marks,
since I would consider the implementation of such spaces to be the
proper job of the typographer, regardless of the mechanism to be used.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com Nobody can possibly know the reach of language, whether liturgical or otherwise, so one should just keep going until one is too exhausted to go any further. - Catherine Pickstock
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