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

From: David Tolpin <dvd@davidashen.net>
Date: Thu Oct 20 2005 - 02:32:53 PDT

On 20/10/2005, at 14:14, Jirka Kosek wrote:

> David Tolpin wrote:
>
>
>> I believe that Mats does not request that, but instead that the
>> XSL recommendation specify how to handle them; because XEP is
>> conforming now.
>>
>
> David, please, could you help me to find corresponding part of XSL-
> FO standard where this space treatment is described? I was unable
> to find this myself.

It does not; the XSL recommendation does not say what to do with
typographic spaces. A conforming behavior would be to leave them as
unicode code points in the document, but most computer fonts don't
have them (unless you typeset everything with Arial Unicode, which is
only good for newspaper headings).

It was about three years ago when I had asked around about this the
previous time, the answer at the time had been that the non-breaking
white space as well as all other typographic spaces should be
displayed at their Unicode codepoints. Despite the fact that it does
not work with modern computer fonts.

There is (or was) actually the code in XEP to compute typographic
spaces, but it leads to more mess with justification, letter-spacing
and so on, not programmatically, but typographically, so the only
sane thing to do at that time was to convert all spaces to a space
and not allow line-breaking on them (except for the true space, of
course). This is rude, but it works, kind of, at least it yields
eligible documents.

A solution would be to specify how to handle them in the XSL
recommendation; but, actually, using thin space to separate quotes
from the text is a bad thing, structured markup should be used
instead. Typographic spaces only make sense when you justify and
align manually; in all other cases you should specify constraints and
extents, not exact spacings.

David
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Received on Thu Oct 20 02:59:21 2005

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