From: Nikolai Grigoriev (grig@renderx.com)
Date: Thu Apr 08 2004 - 07:46:32 PDT
Jim,
first of all, I'd like to thank you and all people who took part
in the line-breaking discussion: it gives us important insights
for future development.
At Tuesday, April 06, 2004 8:13 PM, Jim Melton wrote:
> I don't think that it would be a violation of your principles to allow
> users to specify a list of "additional characters" at which words/strings
> could be broken.
We don't have any principles to disallow something :-). It is simply
a matter of design: we are still in search of a proper interface to
line breaking control.
> It is *extremely* inconvenient for document authors to
> have to manually insert zero-width spaces (no such think on *my* keyboard,
> so I'd have to use a character entity reference) or soft hyphens (same
> problem), especially when there might be literally scores or hundreds of
> places in a large, dynamic document.
You are not supposed to do it manually: stylesheets or other preprocessors
should be able to cope with the task. Our initial assumption was that
a user can implement a line breaking algorighm of whatever complexity
by writing a separate preprocessor that would insert zero-width spaces
and soft hyphens to control the formatter. Now it seems that the interface
is too low-level, and requires too much effort to leverage.
> I'd like to add my voice to Jim Quest's in asking that
> RenderX reconsider the decisions regarding hyphenating/breaking
> character sequences based on either predefined non-letter
> characters or non-letter characters specified by the person
> installing/configuring XEP, and the decision to arbitrarily
> break character sequences when no such "break character"
> can be found and no hyphenation rule can be applied.
What we see from this thread is the need to add a configurable
input preprocessor to XEP, so that line breaking could be expressed
in terms of character classes and/or hyphenation patterns, rather than
special characters. The work is about to start; I don't promise
immediate results, but we are definitely going to take the issue
very seriously.
Best regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX
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