Re: Re[2]: [xep-support] Hyphenation at /

From: Nikolai Grigoriev (grig@renderx.com)
Date: Thu Apr 08 2004 - 07:46:32 PDT

  • Next message: svenkataramany@chubb.com: "[xep-support] Re: XEP deployment issues"

    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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