Re: [iip] Dandas are wrapped alone to the beginning of a line (#88)

There are two different (and conflicting) practices used in inputting and displaying danda characters. There are reasonable arguments to be made in favour of either practice, but the fact that both exist and are used seems an issue unlikely to go away soon.

Some users always input a space character before the danda, and like their fonts to space the danda accordingly, i.e. to be narrowly and evenly spaced on both sides.

Some users don't input a space character before the danda, and also like their fonts to space the danda accordingly, i.e. with more space on the left side.

The visual result desired by both sets of users is the same: a danda with a roughly equal amount of space on the left and right. But they are used to achieving it in different ways, largely dependent on the typesetting systems and fonts with which they are most familiar. And yes, this means that text ends up differently encoded depending on what font is used.

In our fonts, we've tended to use the second option, with the space built in on the left side of the danda _because this is how our clients in India encode their text,_ without a space character before the danda. These clients are newspaper publishers, and this encoding practice is something they've inherited from previous typesetting technologies. One of the benefits, from their perspective, is that this practice prevents the danda from getting separated from the preceding word at line breaks.

Liang Hai has already convinced me that the line breaking danda handling is something that _should_ be independent of whether there is a space character inserted before the danda or not. But in practice, this isn't something one can rely on yet.

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Received on Tuesday, 10 March 2020 16:53:45 UTC