J.Pietschmann wrote:
> Patrick Andries wrote:
>
>>> This begs the question: how should arbitrary
>>> non-breaking spaces be expressed in XSLFO, and how often does
>>> this issue arise?
>>
>> Well, in fine French typography, this occurs often. Semicolon,
>> question marks and exclanation marks, for instance, should be
>> preceded by a fine non-breaking space while colon and closing
>> guillemet ( ») should be preceded by a larger non-breaking space. I
>> believe Unicode does not distinguish between these two cases, its
>> customary answer would be that this is a higher protocol's duty :
>> Unicode only marks a semantic function (non-breaking space) not its
>> appearance. In other words, it's FO's problem ?
>
>
> This is my understanding. There is already a certain proliferation
> of spaces, and the Unicoders quite explicitely stated they feel
> mainly responsible for stuff resulting in glyphs
Well, they feel responsible for characters. Glyphs is not Unicode's
realm, they will off course turn out as such (most of them in any case:
some are invisible, such as language tags).
> and want to
> support control characters, separators and spaces only to the
> extent necessary for compatibility and to deal with the cases
> which arise most often. I think they would like if there were
> a fo:word :-)
Not sure, we actually discussed this topic on the Unicode internal list
(sentence and word boundaries) . Word is a very language-specific thing:
even French and English don't use the same typographical conventions to
delimit them. Never mind languages like Thai where spaces do not
separate words. Also I do not know off hand of any Unicode rendering
algorithm that needs to know what a word is (sorting does), determing
what is a paragraph (<fo:block>), however, is essential for
bidirectional rendering.
>
> Well, arbitrary spaces can be achived in XSLFO by using space-start
> on a fo:inline. Attaching a keep-with-previous="always" should make
> it non-breaking in my understanding, for example
> <fo:block>Mr. <fo:inline space-start="0.4en"
> keep-with-previous="always">Bean</fo:inline><fo:block>
> Seems to be an awful lot to write for a sort of fine tuning effect
> (most readers wouldn't appreciate it, or even take notice).
This insertion should be done at another level (in French the
non-breaking width variation is pretty deterministic, an XSLT stylesheet
could do it I suppose).
> Well, current FOP ignores both properties on fo:inline anyway.
(Already mentioned on an different list : I would really love to have an
idea how things are progressing. It would be good for this to be posted
regularly in a succinct fashion on the Web site.
http://xml.apache.org/fop/design/status.html is very laconic. Difficult
to plan any action on this base.)
>
>
> Ah, again:
> <fo:block>Mozi<fo:inline space-start="0.4en">lla</fo:inline><fo:block>
> hopefully never breaks in the middle unless permitted by hyphenation,
> it's just a word with a gap. Is this correct?
Intuitively, yes.
P. Andries
Tout Unicode en français
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