Re: [clreq] Low line or underline?

> The project is a set of requirements of layouts. The above-mentioned subsection of the document does not, in any way, suggest or imply that we implement such feature with combining character technology of Unicode or the <u> element of HTML. It simply indicates the most idealistic solution. In which case, proper name marks and title marks are both characters just like commas, periods and emphasis marks, plus the gap thing @bobbytung said about.

I agree that the document should provide requirements rather than technical implementations or solutions, and that's actually why i'm concerned about this. I'm not yet convinced that this section is correct or pitched at the right level. 

The current wording implies quite strongly that use of a character is the normal way to achieve one type of book title mark. "U+FE4F WAVY LOW LINE [﹏] is positioned at the foot end of the annotated text."  That is implying, for me, a proposed solution or implementation detail. Same applies in the following section, Proper noun marks, and maybe elsewhere. There is no mention that this is normally achieved using text decoration styling.

Also, to classify this effect as punctuation just because those characters or their alternatives are classed as a type of punctuation doesn't necessarily follow, for me.  Actually, I think we should have a section on text decoration that describes wavy lines as an alternative means of indicating a book title, and point to that from the punctuation section, which describes the use of angle brackets.

The punctuation section is a little unusual in that sometimes it is useful to indicate usage patterns by referring to characters used, such as use of double ellipsis characters, but i don't think that's the case here, because:

1. although the characters cited suggest the shape to be used, it's not clear to me that they _are_ used to achieve the effect cited. Have you seen these characters in use?

2. it's true that both characters have the Unicode property of "Puncuation, connector" but they are also both compatibility characters, which map to U+005F LOW LINE

3. the Unicode standard says of both characters "They were intended, **in the Chinese standard**, for the representation of various types of overlining or underlining, for emphasis of text **when laid out horizontally**.  Except for round-trip mapping with legacy character encodings, **the use of these characters is to be discouraged**; use of styles is the preferred way to handle such effects in modern text rendering." v10, pp288-289 [my bold emphasis]

So i agree with your point about this document describing requirements, rather than solutions. I also think that it's ok to describe typical implementations of punctuation by referring to characters.  But i don't think those things apply to use of wavy or not wavy underlines. And i think we should cross-reference to a section about text decoration.

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Btw, the proofread changes you made recently are useful, i think, where the wording changes make the subsections describe functions rather than a particular Unicode character, eg. 'Fullwidth colon and fullwidth semicolon' -> 'Periods, commas and secondary commas', or 'interpunct' (as a feature) rather than 'middle dot'. I have long thought we should be moving in that direction.  I think the section titles should describe some semantic function that one wants to achieve, and then explain how that is typically done. There are still some subsections, however, that are focused more on taking a Unicode code point and showing how it is used, for example 'Solidus' (which might be better titled as 'Poetry separators' and 'Character separators', or 'Parentheses', rather than 'Clarifications & asides', etc.

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Received on Monday, 23 July 2018 12:49:56 UTC