I am trying to find an authority for the rules by which Western
languages are composed into lines, in particular, the rules for where
line breaks are allowed.
Annex 14, Line Breaking Properties, of the Unicode specification says:
"Three principal styles of context analysis determine line-breaking
opportunities.
"1. Western — spaces and hyphens are used to determine breaks
..."
As a native speaker of English I know this statement to be true but I
can't find an authority that says so.
This issue is related to the ways in which different FO implementations
do line breaking.
For background, Annex 14 is very permissive, implicitly allowing line
breaks wherever they are not explicitly disallowed and does not, for
example, disallow breaks following closing punctuation, allowing for
example, this break:
"e.
g., a thing"
That is, Annex 14 allows this break, even though it would be wrong in
any Western language I'm familiar with.
Annex 14 is also informative--it does not require conforming Unicode
implementations to implement the Annex 14 rules except for those
characters that have normative line breaking properties, such as line
separator and soft hyphen.
I'd be grateful for any assistance.
Thanks,
Eliot
--
W. Eliot Kimber
ISOGEN International, LLC
eliot@xxxxxxxxxx
www.isogen.com
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list