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Re: [Groff] Permissible characters for hyphenation
From: |
John Gardner |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] Permissible characters for hyphenation |
Date: |
Mon, 30 May 2016 23:09:03 +1000 |
>
> I have been convinced that soft hyphen is a control character and
> not something visual,
Almost correct.
Soft hyphens *do* describe potential breaking points, but they only become
visible when surrounding text is broken.
For instance, assume this line had soft-hyphens every 20 characters:
Methionylalanylthreonylserylarginylglycylalanylserylarginylcysteinylproly
When wrapped, this is how it would look:
Methionylalanylthre-
onylserylarginylgly-
cylalanylserylargin-
ylcysteinylproly
Without soft-hyphens (and when wrapped to 20 columns), it'd look like this
instead:
Methionylalanylthre
onylserylarginylgly
cylalanylserylargin
ylcysteinylproly
Here, hyphenation becomes a lot less apparent.
I should also add that I don't know how well-supported this behaviour is
between different platforms. I remember reading that some browsers
displayed the hyphen between broken word boundaries, while others didn't.
Web authors were encouraged to use the more semantic and reliable <wbr/>
element <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/wbr>
instead.
On 30 May 2016 at 22:29, Steffen (Daode) Nurpmeso <address@hidden>
wrote:
> Stephen Berman <address@hidden> wrote:
> |Does groff permit characters besides hyphen-minus (ASCII 45) and soft
> |hyphen (octal 255) for displaying hyphenation in man pages? I'm asking
>
> I have been convinced that soft hyphen is a control character and
> not something visual, it should be used as a «break-indicator»
> rather than as a hyphenation character, interpretation of which is
> left as an excercise for the processing software. I have no idea
> still but would guess groff uses "hyphen minus" U+002D or hyphen
> U+2010 if Unicode is possible.
>
> |because the Emacs package man.el displays references to other man pages
> |(e.g. in the SEE ALSO section) as clickable links, but has a bug when
> |such a reference is hyphenated, and in trying to fix this bug the above
> |question arose (see
> |http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2016-05/msg01358.html).
> |I'd be grateful for a definitive answer or at least a pointer to
> |relevant documentation.
>
> Sorry. Truly.
>
> --steffen
>
>