On 12/21/19, Murray Sargent <murr...@exchange.microsoft.com> wrote: > I checked with the Word team and they actually tried out stretching NBSP > back in 2015 in the "good client" mode. But customer feedback was negative. > The problem is that NBSP is used sometimes when stretching isn't wanted such > as between the end of a question and the question mark or in multi-word > trademarks or in italic expressions such as ad infinitum. Another example is > Text « quotation » more text. One doesn't want the « and » to > be spaced apart from "quotation" for justification purposes. > > Conceivably Word should offer a special justification option to stretch > NBSP, but user feedback has revealed that it's not a good default option.
Ohkay and that's very nice meaningful feedback from actual developer+user interaction. So the way I look at this going forward is that we have four options: 1) With the existing single NBSP character, provide a software option to either make it flexible or inflexible, but this preference should be stored as part of the document and not the application settings, else shared documents would not preserve the layout intended by the creator. 2) Consider that the non-stretching behaviour of wordprocessors (probably following MS Word) is correct, and encode a new NBFSP non-breaking flexible space. [I'm looking at that convenient hole at 2065.] DTP software like InDesign/TeX (and browsers like Firefox, though web content is assumed to be more fluid typographically) should then ideally conform to this and potentially break their users' documents (esp in the case of DTP). 3) Consider that the stretching behaviour of DTP software like InDesign is correct, and encode a new FWNBSP fixed-width non-breaking space [at 2065]. Wordprocessors should then ideally conform to this and potentially break their users' documents. 4) Leave alone the existing ambiguous behaviour of NBSP, and encode two new characters [Supplemental Punctuation has space at 2E50…] for NBFSP and FW-NBSP. Like the existing 2028 and 2029 Line and Paragraph Separators with the annotation: “may be used to represent this semantic unambiguously”. -- Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा 𑀰𑁆𑀭𑀻𑀭𑀫𑀡𑀰𑀭𑁆𑀫𑀸
