Re: NNBSP Impact

On 17 July 2015 at 10:08, Martin J. Dürst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:
>
> On 2015/07/17 16:05, jrmt@almas.co.jp wrote:
>
> As the text in the Unicode standard explains, ZWNJ and ZWJ are used for this
> also in Arabic/Persian. They are also used in Persian for separating
> suffixes (Arabic doesn't have separable suffixes).
>
>> For this reason, we should not use ZWNJ for Mongolian Suffix Separator.
>
> There may be good reasons for not using ZWNJ as a Mongolian Suffix
> Separator, but the above alone are not convincing (not to me, and most
> probably also not to the Unicode Technical Committee).

Using ZWNJ in place of NNBSP is definitely a not an option in my
opinion, as ZWNJ affects the joining behaviour of preceding and
following Mongolian letters in one particular way (selects non-joining
forms), but NNBSP affects the joining behaviour of preceding and
following Mongolian letters in a different way (selects non-joining
form for preceding letter but may select an initial, medial or final
form of the following letter depending on the suffix).  It is
impossible for one character to inform two different shaping
behaviours for the same following letter.

Personally I am not in favour of replacing NNBSP with a new character
at this late stage in the game, and I think that it will be a very
hard sell to the UTC, who I suspect will be very concerned about
destabilizing existing Mongolian data if a new character is
introduced.  As the issues raised in this discussion about NNBSP do
not involve shaping at the rendering level, but are problems related
to correctly determining word boundaries by software that processes
Mongolian data, in my opinion the best solution would be to modify the
word break property of NNBSP (which is currently "XX").

Andrew

Received on Friday, 17 July 2015 12:21:39 UTC