🚀 go-pugleaf

>ag129@cus.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant) writes:

>ISO 8859-1 includes "no-break space" and "soft hyphen" which are intended
>to print as space and hyphen without being considered suitable targets
>for automatic line breaks and hyphenation.  Do these characters have a
>future?  Are they widely used?

All ISO 8859 sets have these two special characters at the same positions.
The purpose of SHY is to represent a hyphen, that has only been inserted
for a line break within a word and that will be removed again, if the
word moves near the middle of the line again during another reformat.

I hope that these two characters will gain more support in future text
editors à la emacs (I'm NOT speaking about real wordprocessing). Many text
editors have some limited paragraph formating capabilities, which have
proofed to be very useful (e.g. for writing USENET articles, README files,
etc.). With plain ASCII it is impossible to add a simple hyphenation 
feature (e.g. à la good old WordStar), because ASCII files will forget,
whether the "-" has been inserted by the user as a real character or only
for a line break. An editor supporting soft hyphen (SHY) will remove
unnecessary SHYs before reformating.

Especially in languages, where long words are quite common (e.g. German),
a line formating function supporting hyphenation is even VERY desireable
in text editors (not only in DTP systems!), because paragraph formatting
without hyphenation often causes ugly paragraphs.

I think, that both NBSP and SHY are a very welcome extension!

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
Internet: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de  |  X.500 entry available
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