Re: [xsl] Authority For Western Line Breaking Rules

["W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Kobayashi wrote:

> I have pointed this thread to Asmus Freytag who is a author of UAX#14.
> Follwings are reply from him, I copied them with the permission 
> from Freytag.

[...]

> (Freytag until the end of body of this mail:)

[...]

> > 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.
>
>
> However, the statement is incorrect. UAX#14 allows breaks after closing 
> punctuation, but not if it precedes alphabetic characters.

That's good to know.

However, I will comment that in my reasonably close (but somewhat 
late-night) reading of Annex 14, I did not see this--the way the rules 
are defined makes it pretty difficult to decode the rules without a 
really close reading--and I'm a person whose spent most of the last 10 
years writing and decoding complex standards.

I know that standards writers are always strapped for resources and that 
these sorts of annexes always get a lower priority, but it would be 
helpful if this annex could be made a little clearer, I think. At a 
minimum, a bit more discussion of the implications of the rules might be 
helpful.

Cheers,

Eliot
--
W. Eliot Kimber
ISOGEN International, LLC
eliot@xxxxxxxxxx
www.isogen.com


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