Re: composed characters question and suggestions for quail-cyrillic-*

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

Ted> I didn't know about the ELLIPSIS issue, thanks.

It was news to me, too.

Ted> My proposed shortcut would not get in the way of normal typing.  

Cool.

Ted> Do I understand correctly, though, that people should just type
Ted> ... (with or without NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE in between) instead of
Ted> using the … character?

Essentially.  Most who use a space, though, tend to use an ASCII SPACE
rather than any type of a nonbreaking space.  (I've worked with
publishers who insisted on ". . ." or " . . .".)  And some might prefer
to use U+A0.  But I expect a narrower space looks better, and you /really/
want to avoid linebreaks inside an ellipses. :)

Ted> Is there value in providing that sequence with the /.. quail key
Ted> sequence instead of … in Emacs, or is that unnecessary?

Hmmm.  I doubt anyone would use it over ... or . . ., but I suppose it
would be useful for those who do want to ensure non-breaking spaces.
And . . . does look better than . . . in DejaVu Serif (by way of variable-
pitch-mode)—and not only because ' ' looks different than ' ' since it
(unlike U+202F) is displayed in the nobreak-space face.

So, I’d say yes.

I’m thinking of adding:

<Multi_key> <period> <1> : "․" U2024 # ONE DOT LEADER
<Multi_key> <period> <2> : "‥" U2025 # TWO DOT LEADER
<Multi_key> <period> <3> : "…" ellipsis # HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS

to the UTF-8 Compose.pre files.  The X11 compose framework converts the
compose sequence to a string (rather than a character), so I could also
have <Multi_key> <period> <period> insert ". . ." rather than "…", so I
could make it match the proposed change to Emacs.  I'll have to give
that some thought.

(As another aside; I just remembered that at least some typographers
maintain that the leader glyphs should not be the same as the period
(or full stop) glyphs, but should be a bit lighter/smaller.  Probably
a related issue.)

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <address@hidden>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6