[xsl] Authority For Western Line Breaking Rules

Subject: [xsl] Authority For Western Line Breaking Rules
From: "W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 22:52:24 -0500
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


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