Hi,

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 12:14:54PM -0500, Orion Adrian wrote:

> >If Unicode linebreaking rules are any good (I do not know them), the
> >problem is actually a different one: Nobody but professional
> >typesetters do know and respect the five or so different types of
> >dash-like characters, all fulfilling a different purpose, and all
> >having a different character code in Unicode (I guess).
> >
> >However, once you actually start to consider the fact that -1
> >shouldn't be broken, you'll probably also consider the fact that
> >minus is something different than a dash or a hyphen...
> >
> 
> This I think is an editor issue.

To some extend, yes. But it doesn't really fix the problem.

Note that text processing systems like LaTeX and MS Word do offer quite
a fine distinction of different '-' characters. But hardly anyone uses
them, or would be able to.

Of course one might try to implement some heuristics for *guessing* what
'-' is meant. (Word probably even does so, as it does for other
things...) However, imperfect heuristics (which is a tautology) can be
*very* annoying... Not sure this is a good idea.

With modern technology allowing (even forcing) everyone to be a
publisher, maybe shools should start teaching basic typesetting
knowledge...

-antrik-