Popular wordprocessors treating U+00A0 as fixed-width

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

Well it's unfortunate that Microsoft's own response (by its MSVP) is
completely wrong, suggesting to use Narrow non-breaking space to get
justification, which is exactly the reverse where these NNBSP should NOT be
justified and keep their width.

Microsoft's developers have absolutely misunderstood the standard where
both SPACE and NBSP should really behave the same for justification (being
different only for the existence of the break opportunity).

This Microsoft response is completrrely supid, and it even breaks the
classic typography for French use of NNBSP ("fine" in French) around some
punctuations (before :;!?» or after «) and as group separators in numbers
(note that NNBSP was introduced in Unicode very late in the standard (and
before that NBSP was used only because this was the only non-breaking space
available but it was much too large!)

Still many documents use NBSP instead of NNBSP around punctuations or as
group separators (but in Word these contextual occurences of NBSP which are
easy to detect, could have been autoreplaced when typesetting, or proposed
as a correction in the integrated speller, at least for French). But the
old behavior of old versions of Office (before NNBSP existed in Unicode)
should have been cleaned up since long.

It's clear that MS Office developers don't know the standards and do what
they want (they also don't know the correct standards for maths in Excel
and use a lot of very stupid assumptions, as if they were smarter than
their users that suffer since long from these bugs !) and don't want to fix
their past errors.

2018-01-01 3:14 GMT+01:00 Shriramana Sharma via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org
>:

> While http://unicode.org/reports/tr14/ clearly states that:
>
> <quote>
> When expanding or compressing interword space according to common
> typographical practice, only the spaces marked by U+0020 SPACE and
> U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE are subject to compression, and only spaces
> marked by U+0020 SPACE, U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE, and occasionally spaces
> marked by U+2009 THIN SPACE are subject to expansion. All other space
> characters normally have fixed width.
> </quote>
>
> … really sad to see the misunderstanding around U+00A0:
>
> https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_
> word-mso_windows8-mso_2016/nonbreakable-space-justification-in-word-2016/
> 4fa1ad30-004c-454f-9775-a3beaa91c88b?auth=1
>
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41652
>
> --
> Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा ������������������������
>
>
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