Whitespace rules (v2)

Rick Jelliffe ricko at allette.com.au
Mon Aug 25 00:48:32 BST 1997


 
> From: Liam Quin <liamquin at interlog.com>
 
> I don't have a copy of 8859 any more to check, but if the hyphen chracter
> is to be treated as a soft hyphen, there's no way to type a hard hyphen...
 
Yes. But why is this a surprise? A "hard hyphen" is a dash (copying whatever
kind of dash has heen used by the application) followed by a hard 
return.

> Perhaps, but to claim that this is more readable to humans than
> 		supercali&softhy;fragalistic&softhy;expialladocious.
> would be absurd.  If you hadn't omitted the # in the 2nd reference, the
> length would have been the same too.  Using &hy; is even better.

It might be more useful to include a hyphenation dictionary at
the top of the document that can be fed into the typesetting application's
hyphenation dictionary, rather than complicate the text with inplace
softhyphens. You can then use any character you like to signal the
soft hyphen, also, which may shorten things.

<hyph-dict>over^blown, under^done
</hyph-dict>

> You can always do
>     <!--* hy: soft (discretionary) hyphenation point: *-->
>     <!Entity hy '&#x200B;'>

Yes. I think people use "&shy;"  for soft hyphen more than "&hy;".


Rick Jelliffe

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