John Hudson responded to Jony Rosenne: > The idea that the position of such text on a page -- as a marginal > note -- somehow demotes > it from being text, is particularly nonsensical.
I think you two (Jony and John) are talking at cross-purposes on this particular point. The *content* of marginal note can be represented as plain text. It is the fact of its being a marginal note, its positioning in the margin in textual layout, and its reference anchoring to the rest of the text it constitutes a marginal annotation for that do *not* consist of plain text, and for which we should not expect a plain text representation. Peter Kirk summed up the main point of the thread: > 2) Allowing floating vowel points (and sometimes accents) with a blank > base character. This usually, but not always, happens at the beginning > of a word. The mechanism for doing this seems to have been clarified by > the UTC: use NBSP as the base character. Correct. > So can't we leave it that these mechanisms can be used for > representation of these forms by those who wish to represent them in > plain text, whereas those who want to use other mechanisms are free to > do so? I agree. That is precisely the intent. And Asmus clarified whatever linebreaking issues there may be. Those should be dealt with in the context of the revision of UAX #14 for Unicode 4.1, which takes into account the changed recommendations regarding NBSP versus SPACE as base for nonspacing marks. --Ken
