Re: [xep-support] Support of special types of spaces

From: David Priest <priest@sfu.ca>
Date: Wed Oct 19 2005 - 12:56:51 PDT

On 19-Oct-05, at 10:36 AM, David Tolpin wrote:
>> Again, its width is *supposed* to be font-dependent. Whether it's
>> in many fonts or not is irrelevant.
>
> But the original poster does not think so. The original poster
> advocates the approach that the typographical spaces should be
> computed if they are not in the font.

Ah.

Given that hair, thin, en, em, and so on are relatively standardized
values (1/10th of an em, 1/5th of an em, an en-width, and an em-
wdth), this doesn't seem unreasonable. There are also figure spaces
and such; they'd require computation of the width of the number zero
and such.

I think most of us who understand the use of spaces would be pretty
happy to have hair, thin, en, and em spaces. The other types of
space see far less use.

>> All XEP has to do is accept that several forms of space are fixed-
>> width, and thus should not be subject to variation due to
>> justification. The spaces can be inserted using entity names or
>> unicode character values.
>
> The previous space-related discussion was about NBSP. The
> discussion has been as emotional as this one, and the community
> stood strong behind the viewpoint that no-break white space should
> vary due to justification.
>
> The only thing that can be done to make programs like XEP usable is
> to strongly discourage the use of typographical spaces until there
> is a clear and unambiguous specification of what to do with them.
> There are better means to accomplish good print quality; you don't
> have to use four-per-em and six-per-em to get a 5/12em white space
> these days.]

Who the heck is using 5/12th em spaces? What a bogus example that is.

We *need* support for a hair and thin spaces because the French
language *demands* them for proper typesetting of punctuation.
There's no two ways about this: you *can not* properly typeset French-
language publications if you do not have these spaces.
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Received on Wed Oct 19 13:27:15 2005

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