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

From: Jim Melton (jim.melton@acm.org)
Date: Thu Apr 08 2004 - 10:43:30 PDT

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    Nikolai,

    I am, as always, delighted at the seriousness with which RenderX takes
    input and suggestions from its users. Your company is definitely a leader
    in understanding customer relations!

    Because of my experience in a previous life writing typesetting systems, I
    am sympathetic with the difficulty in discovering a mechanism for modifying
    the way that hyphenation algorithms treat special cases (including special
    characters). Thus, I really appreciate your willingness to think about how
    this might be done in the context of XEP. Speaking personally, I think the
    approach of identifying such modifications in terms of character classes is
    likely to be a very successful approach. I am less certain about using the
    specification of hyphenation patterns, probably because the systems on
    which I have personally worked had very obscure mechanisms for specifying
    those patterns ;^)

    Thanks again!
        Jim

    At 08:46 AM 4/8/2004 Thursday, Nikolai Grigoriev wrote:
    >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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    ========================================================================
    Jim Melton --- Editor of ISO/IEC 9075-* (SQL) Phone: +1.801.942.0144
    Oracle Corporation Oracle Email: jim dot melton at oracle dot com
    1930 Viscounti Drive Standards email: jim dot melton at acm dot org
    Sandy, UT 84093-1063 Personal email: jim at melton dot name
    USA Fax : +1.801.942.3345
    ========================================================================
    = Facts are facts. However, any opinions expressed are the opinions =
    = only of myself and may or may not reflect the opinions of anybody =
    = else with whom I may or may not have discussed the issues at hand. =
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