A last missing link for interoperable representation

Julian Bradfield via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Tue Jan 15 04:04:33 CST 2019


On 2019-01-15, Philippe Verdy via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> This is not for Mongolian and French wanted this space since long and it
> has a use even in English since centuries for fine typography.
> So no, NNBSP is definitely NOT "exotic whitespace". It's just that it was
> forgotten in the early stages of computing with legacy 8-bit encodings but
> it should have been in Unicode since the begining as its existence is
> proven long before the computing age (before ASCII, or even before Baudot
> and telegraphic systems). It has alsway been used by typographs, it has
> centuries of tradition in publishing. And it has always been recommended
> and still today for French for all books/papers publishers.

Do you expect people to encode all the variable justification spaces
between words by combining all the (numerous) spaces already available
in Unicode?
And how about the kerning between letters? If spacing of punctuation
is to be encoded instead of left to display algorithms, shouldn't you
also encode the kerns instead of leaving them to the font display
technology?

Oh, and what about dropped initials? They have been used in both
manuscripts and typography for many centuries - surely we must encode
them?

-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.



More information about the Unicode mailing list