- From: Deborah A. Lapeyre <dlapeyre@mulberrytech.com>
- Date: Sat, 9 Nov 1996 11:19:14 -0800 (PST)
- To: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM.UIC.EDU>
- cc: W3C SGML Working Group <w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org>
Special spaces are, among other things, a rather old-fashioned typographic technique for inserting a "known" amount of space in a location. The advantage of em-space and en-space (and thin and the like) is that, if your composition device allows it, these can be both clearly specified and font variable. (I.E., My em-space in 36 point Bodini bold not just a generic 12-pt em.) ASCII (currently) makes a distinction between "whitespace" (spaces and tabs) and special characters that happen to resolve to a space on display. Some of these are measured amounts of space (en, em, thin, digit, .. ). Some of these are behaviors, such as "hard-space" or "non breaking space". There hasn't been a problem because SGML tools do not treat   as a space, and wouldn't even CONSIDER compressing "    " into " " although " " is compressed to " ". General thoughts: 1) At least as used in the past, an author intends for special spaces never to go away or be replaced by a "space". 2) How relevant is any of this to screen display? How relevant is any of this to Unicode now? 3) If all spaces translate to "space", then who cares? If the special spaces are individual characters (a la Unicode) then they are not "spaces" at all. Are there any "spaces" that are not characters? (I'm floundering here; these spaces have tied my tongue, but I know what I mean. Can anyone rescue here?) --Debbie Lapeyre ======================================================================= Deborah A. Lapeyre Phone: 301-231-6933 Mulberry Technologies, Inc. Fax: 301-231-6935 6010 Executive Blvd. Suite 608 E-mail: dlapeyre@mulberrytech.com Rockville, MD USA 20852 =======================================================================
Received on Saturday, 9 November 1996 14:19:10 UTC