Re: [css3-text] scoping line break controls, characters that disappear at the end of lines

(12/04/01 4:10), Koji Ishii wrote:
> By eliminating logically incorrect combinations and incorporating opinions from Japan, we have 3 options:
> 1. YES on the beginning, NO on the end, and keep consecutive spaces together.
> 2. YES on the beginning, YES on the end of line, and allow break between them.
> 3. Variation of 1; allow only one ideographic space at the end, and ignore the rest.
> 
> MS Word behaves #1. Most traditional Japanese word processors in 1980/90s behaved #2. #3 is from JLTF, where he likes Word's behavior except that an ideographic space after an exclamation or question mark should be honored.
> 
> I quickly looked at current behaviors[1]:
> MS Word: #1
> Adobe InDesign: #2
> IE9: #1

Based on your example, I don't think what IE9 does can be precisely
described by 1. Note that "６" in example "１２ ６" and "７" in example
"１２ ７" end up in the same position. Therefore, I think the correct
description is "YES for the beginning of the first line, NO for the
beginning for the rest of the lines". This is similar to how the spec
says about the normal space (U+0020) except that there's difference in
how the spaces at the beginning of the first line is handled.

> FF11: Neither. Breaks look like IE, but the last two are different. Justification behavior is also different.
> Chrome18/Safari5: #2
> 
> MS Word took #1 because in 1990s, many Japanese authors used ideographic spaces and ASCII spaces mixed without understanding so. Oftentimes they do so intentionally assuming two ASCII spaces are equivalent to one ideographic space, because it was so in most traditional CUI-based software. To handle two ASCII spaces and one ideographic space in the same way, and also to support Latin typography, #1 was the best choice.

(12/04/02 10:06), Ambrose LI wrote:
> 2012/4/1 "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
>> Very interesting. Can you tell us where these spaces are used? For
>> example around the names of a person being 'honored'? Or throughout
>> the text?
>>
> I am probably not the best person to answer this, since by the time I
> went to school this is (IIRC) no longer properly taught. However,
> this seems to be still current usage.

I was taught about this when I was at elementary school, not sure if I
ever use it besides in that class. Surprisingly, you can find these
examples online in some of the museums sites[1]. (some of these use
half-width space instead of full-width, sigh...)

(12/04/04 0:18), Koji Ishii wrote:
> Do you have an image where a line breaks before the honorific space?
> I wonder if it still take up a space or not.

It should. When the elementary taught about composition, we use grid
paper and we were not taught about the "special behavior" that we should
remove the space when it's at the beginning.

But actually trying to find an example on a book might be very
difficult. The editor might deliberately prevent honorific spaces from
happening at the beginning of a line because it would otherwise be
confused with indentation. I think this is just similar to the fact that
it is not simple to find a punctuation at the beginning of a line in a
book. Whether that is allowed is a bit debatable. Of course you can find
an essay with punctuations at the beginning written on a grid paper by
an elementary student.

In any case, I think this use isn't important enough to justify any
change to spec. An author can use 'white-sapce: pre-wrap;' to preserve
the honorific space when necessary.

Having said that, given that 1. is somewhat irregular, I am somewhat
leaning toward the behavior of 2., which preserves honorific spaces
automatically. I think this approach has the advantage of not making the
space handling algorithm, which is used everywhere on the Web, more complex.

(12/04/04 0:56), Koji Ishii wrote:
> I made a picture of what JLTF wants[1]. This looks like special
> casing of ideographic space when appeared right before the end of
> line and I thought it's too complex. But I guess the following rule
> will suffice JLTF requirements:
>
> 3. YES after hard-break, NO after soft-break, YES at end, and can
> break between.

Well, if this is what JLTF wants, as I said, I don't think honorific
spaces are important enough to affect the decision, but I still wonder
whether browsers besides IE9 are willing to implement this.


[1] http://www.yatsen.gov.tw/chinese/about/milestone.php


Cheers,
Kenny

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2012 23:35:08 UTC