what is the purpose of U+2012 ?

Kent Karlsson kent.b.karlsson at bahnhof.se
Sun Dec 25 14:48:56 CST 2022


I would not say that it is all that useless today. FIGURE DASH may well be used to indicate an unknown (digit) value, esp. in a tabular setting.
One may be tempted to use ? instead, but actually using dash is more common, and less clumsy. And then have the dash be of digit width (using
an otherwise proportional font, but with fixed width ((ascii)) digits) makes it look even better… Unknown (not yet planned, or not yet foreseeable,
or, for that matter, could not retrieve value from database/computation/similar) values are quite common.

/Kent K


> 30 nov. 2022 kl. 20:14 skrev Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>:
> 
> On 11/30/2022 10:46 AM, Jörg Knappen via Unicode wrote:
>> this character
>> seems somewhat redundant.
> Which is neither here nor there. It's been on the books for over 30 years and before that presumably found in earlier character sets.
> 
> The presumption would be that there are documents that use it, and that they depend on the properties as stated. That means, some fonts will continue to support it, allowing users to decide to use it for new documents, which then strengthens the need to have continuing font support.
> 
> That said, it may reflect a typographic practice that isn't widely used today, but perhaps still more widely used than many a symbol from an archaic script?
> 
> A./

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