Not really, in many applications it will translate in one or more dots
just to create a dotted line (notably within layout processors for
publishing). This looks more like a "styled" thin whitespace, and
semantically it really has this value (the number of dots is not really relevant).
For example I would not be shocked if a text using it was rendered with a monospaced font, where the base line of the character cell shows
multiple tiny dots, that create a contiguous dotted line when multiple
U+2024 characters (one per display cell) are used to indent the text in columns.
Of course with proportional fonts this character would display at least (and preferably) a single dot. Any use of this character that assumes
it is a symbol consisting in a single dot aligned on the baseline seems to abuse the semantic of this character, which is not a punctuation,
but really a styling character used instead of an "invisible" thin
space.
Where is this behavior indicated by Unicode specifications?
Such behavior appears to me to be a non-standard extension on Unicode, interpreting what Unicode classes as a General Puncutation character as instead a Formatting Character.
Individual applications can do such things as they wish as part of a higher protocol.
But I don't see how conforming aplications could assume this semantic for the character when reading in plain text Unicode or writing plain text Unicode.
What then is U+2025 TWO DOT LEADER?
Are there any other characters in Unicode that are *expected* to stretch in size and produce multiple images?
Jim Allan
