Soft Hyphens in Complex and East Asian Scripts

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 17:46:57 +0000
Koji Ishii <kojiishi at gluesoft.co.jp> wrote:

> Korean has U+00AD encoded in their legacy encoding, so they may have
> typographic rules for it, but I’m not very familiar with Korean. As
> far as I searched for KLREQ[1], I could not get a hit.

> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/klreq/

Thanks for the link.  Reading it leaves me uncertain as to whether one
should expect to encounter U+00AD within a Korean word, but the part of
the issue may be how it is to be rendered.

I found some very relevant reading at the Cascading Style Sheets
literature.  http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#hyphenate appears to
reveal the existence of soft hyphens in Arabic text.  Santhosh
Thottingal has been doing some well-received work on hyphenation in
Indian scripts (see e.g.
http://thottingal.in/blog/2013/03/17/hyphenation-in-web ), and the only
criticism I could see was in the rendering of the active soft hyphens.
There is a suggested solution at
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text-4/#hyphenate-character , though I'm
not sure that there will always be a character with the right glyph.

On the basis of this information, I'm happy to contend that U+00AD can
be found in words in many non-'Western' scripts.  I can't even be
beaten by a claim that ZWSP is the character for an invisible soft
hyphen.

Richard.