[xep-support] Support of special types of spaces

[David Tolpin]

On 20/10/2005, at 14:14, Jirka Kosek wrote:

> David Tolpin wrote:
>
>
>> I believe that Mats does not request that, but instead that the  
>> XSL  recommendation specify how to handle them; because XEP is  
>> conforming  now.
>>
>
> David, please, could you help me to find corresponding part of XSL- 
> FO standard where this space treatment is described? I was unable  
> to find this myself.

It does not; the XSL recommendation does not say what to do with  
typographic spaces. A conforming behavior would be to leave them as  
unicode code points in the document, but most computer fonts don't  
have them (unless you typeset everything with Arial Unicode, which is  
only good for newspaper headings).

It was about three years ago when I had asked around about this the  
previous time, the answer at the time had been that the non-breaking  
white space as well as all other typographic spaces should be  
displayed at their Unicode codepoints. Despite the fact that it does  
not work with modern computer fonts.

There is (or was) actually the code in XEP to compute typographic  
spaces, but it leads to more mess with justification, letter-spacing  
and so on, not programmatically, but typographically, so the only  
sane thing to do at that time was to convert all spaces to a space  
and not allow line-breaking on them (except for the true space, of  
course). This is rude, but it works, kind of, at least it yields  
eligible documents.

A solution would be to specify how to handle them in the XSL  
recommendation; but, actually, using thin space to separate quotes  
from the text is a bad thing, structured markup should be used  
instead. Typographic spaces only make sense when you justify and  
align manually; in all other cases you should specify constraints and  
extents, not exact spacings.

David
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