Aw: Re: NBSP supposed to stretch, right?

[Jörg Knappen]

 

Well,

 

in TeX and LaTeX, the no break space (indicated by the active character ~ in TeX input files) is stretchable and stretches to a

normal inter-word space such that all inter-word spaces in a line are equal. But multiple no break spaces still add up to wider spaces

in the output unlike usual space tokens that are collapsed to one space token.

 

-- Jörg Knappen

 

Gesendet: Dienstag, 17. Dezember 2019 um 17:20 Uhr
Von: "Asmus Freytag via Unicode" <unicode@unicode.org>
An: unicode@unicode.org
Betreff: Re: NBSP supposed to stretch, right?

On 12/17/2019 2:41 AM, Shriramana Sharma via Unicode wrote:

On Tue 17 Dec, 2019, 16:09 QSJN 4 UKR via Unicode, <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:

Agree.
By the way, it is common practice to use multiple nbsp in a row to
create a larger span. In my opinion, it is wrong to replace fixed
width spaces with non-breaking spaces.
Quote from Microsoft Typography Character design standards:
«The no-break space is not the same character as the figure space. The
figure space is not a character defined in most computer system's
current code pages. In some fonts this character's width has been
defined as equal to the figure width. This is an incorrect usage of
the character no-break space.»

 

Sorry but I don't understand how this addresses the issue I raised.

You don't?

In principle it may be true that NBSP is not fixed width, but show me software that doesn't treat it that way.

In HTML, NBSP isn't subject to space collapse, therefore it's the go-to space character when you need some extra spacing that doesn't disappear.

I bet, in many other environments it was typically the only "other" space character, so it ended up overloaded.

My hunch is that it is too late at this point to try to promulgate a "clean" implementation of NBSP, because it would effectively change untold documents retroactively. So it would be a massively breaking change.

If you have a situation where you need really poor layout (wide inter-word spaces) to justify, the fact that a honorific in front of a name works more like it's part of the same word (because the NBSP doesn't stretch) would be the least of my worries. (Although, on lines where interword spaces are a reduced a bit, I can see that becoming counter-intuitive).

If you only fix this in software for high-end typography, you'd still have the issue that things will behave differently if you export your (plain) text. And you would have the issue of what to do when you want fixed spaces to be non-breaking as well (is that ever needed?).

A./