Kent,
with respect to Markus' reply:
On 1/24/2026 9:23 AM, Markus Scherer via Unicode wrote:
For “ambiguous” quote marks (and for that matter apostrophes also
when not used as quotation marks) and line breaking
I have proposed an update to the Unicode line breaking rules (not
language/typographic tradition dependent) in
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25261r-line-breaking.pdf.
That should take care of the line breaking issue (very annoying at
present) for “ambiguous” quote marks.
About that, see L2/26-006
<https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2026/26006-utc186-properties-recs.pdf> =
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2026/26006-utc186-properties-recs.pdf
section 4.1 / page 11.
the key here is that Unicode is shifting away from accepting proposals
that simply say: "this is (obviously) a better way", in favor of case
studies that provide concrete examples of (in this case, bad
linebreaks), preferably observed in practice rather than reconstructed.
The reason is that the algorithm is now widely deployed and we've
already run into the situation that fixing something in response to user
complaints has made support for other orthographies worse.
We need to better understand how "bad" the current approach is and what
issues it causes, but this needs to be in some detail, so we can better
judge both the benefit and the cost in affecting other orthographies.
If the changes made in version 15.1 do adversely affect particular
languages that may not have been on the radar, we would like to know
about that but we'd like to see the case studies, not simply the
conclusions.
A./
