Scott Meyers wrote:
John W. Kennedy wrote:
You can't, in general. You just have to deal with the fact that there
are always going to be exceptional and difficult cases. A problem that
I had a couple of years back, for example, was in transcribing an
18th-century play (William Dunlap's 1798 "André: a tragedy in five
acts"), which has a character named "M‘Donald". (Look again.)
I agree that there will always be corner cases, but I don't know that
either of us has given an example of one. In my case, I'd be happy for
"+" and "_" to be treated as alphabetic characters, i.e., parts of
words. (As opposed to characters indicating breaks between words, e.g.
spaces, tabs, hard line breaks, etc.) In your case, you'd presumably
like "‘" to be treated as such a character. All OO would need would be
a way for us to specify which characters should be treated as parts of
words. Then it'd be just a matter of specifying hyphenation
points/rules, which I assume OO already allows.
But it is easy to give cases where "+" should be a break, and easy to
give cases where "‘" should, even in the same documents.
DeScribe had a simple do-not-break character attribute; I have always
wished OOo had the same. (For example, many manuals of style regard it
as an abomination to put a soft hyphen in a word with a hard hyphen.
That is, it is improper to create "a high-traf-fic area", even though
there's nothing wrong with "traf-fic".)
--
John W. Kennedy
"The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in
their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is
suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has
become full of /Pooh./"
-- Frederick Crews. "Postmodern Pooh", Preface
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