On Monday 27 February 2006 18:55, Jeremias Maerki wrote: > What's the status of UAX#14? Does anybody have had time to work on > that, yet? I'm asking because I'm considering hacking in support for > the fixed width spaces (U+2000..U+200A). One of my clients asks for > that but I can't allocate enough time right now to do the whole > thing, unfortunately. >
I don't think UAX#14 will happen in a hurry. However in http://wiki.apache.org/xmlgraphics-fop/LineBreaking I do describe possible handling of fixed width spaces. The main decision, and that has little to do with UAX#14 is if these spaces are to be treated like white space when it comes to linebreaks or like non-breakable spaces. If one follows the XSL-FO spec to the letter these spaces are not white space and therefore are not removed around a line break. I have no idea what actual user expectations are when it comes to these spaces. Would authors (especially in non english / latin languages) expect these spaces to be removed around a linebreak or not? The relevant Knuth sequences which need to be generated depend on that decision: Is the space removable or not when a break occurs? I am also uncertain how these spaces interact with line justification. They are by definition not elastic. So if you have a fixed width space only between two words this is not an inter word gap that can be used for justification. Therefore any calculations which rely on knowing the number of words on a line to determine how many inter word gaps we have to then calculate the per gap justification amount will need to be adjusted to not count inter word gaps which only contain fixed width spaces. On the other hand they are still word boundaries for the purpose of finding words for hyphenation. > Jeremias Maerki Manuel
