On Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 2:05:55 AM, Peter wrote:
PM> On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:40:16AM -0400, bulia byak wrote:
- Finally and most importantly, while it did add correct hyphen
points to the text, Inkscape didn't treat them correctly: it just broke words at those points but didn't insert visible hyphens as it should (in English text). I know that some languages need to insert hyphens and some don't. What is the proper way to fix this? Should Inkscape determine this based on xml:lang?
PM> I haven't checked whether the SVG standard makes specific mention of soft PM> hyphen, but the following may be relevant:
As you point out, the definition of the soft hyphen is in Unicode, not in SVG. SVG does not override the Unicode standard, but notmatively references it.
PM> http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr14/#SoftHyphen
I agree that a soft hyphen is the correct way to indicate a line-break opportunity in Western languages which use hyphenation on word breaks. The soft hyphen should not render unless it is at the end of the line.
PM> I might also draw attention to the wikipedia page for hyphen PM> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen), whose references section points to some PM> controversy as to how U+00ad should be handled.
It seems fairly clear to me:
"the concept of a soft hyphen was introduced to allow manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break was allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text was later reflowed. In contrast, a hyphen that is always displayed and printed is called a hard hyphen"
"When flowing text, a system may consider the soft hyphen to be a point at which a word may be broken, and display a hyphen at the end of the broken line; if the line is not broken at that point the hyphen is not displayed"