Popular wordprocessors treating U+00A0 as fixed-width

[Jonathan Rosenne via Unicode]

May we all please keep this discussion civil. People, being human, may sometimes make mistakes, but that does not necessarily justify calling them names.

Best Regards,

Jonathan Rosenne

From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Philippe Verdy via Unicode
Sent: Monday, January 01, 2018 5:43 AM
To: Shriramana Sharma
Cc: UnicoDe List
Subject: Re: Popular wordprocessors treating U+00A0 as fixed-width

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<mailto: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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