From a programmer’s perspective it is usually much nicer to not have special cases: if U+200B were just a space (i.e. eligible for line breaks) then the rest would follow normally. Now, it could make sense to retrofit a font during font loading with a trivial definition of U+200B if it does not already provide one.
Disclaimer: I am not familiar with the XeTeX codebase, just commenting from the peanut gallery. Regards, Roland > 30 sep. 2019 kl. 11:57 skrev Suki Venkat <suki.ven...@gmail.com>: > > Exactly! > That's how all the browsers seems to behave anyway, > i.e., treating 200B as potential point for a line-break, > even if it is not defined in the font. > > Suki > > On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 4:55 AM Mike Maxwell <maxw...@umiacs.umd.edu > <mailto:maxw...@umiacs.umd.edu>> wrote: > On 9/29/2019 3:02 PM, Suki Venkat wrote: > > Then went on to hack the hyph-ta.texfile and did "mktexfmt xelatex" > > to produce nice results using XeLaTeX. > > It turned out the uni200B was not defined in the font, although uni200C > > and uni200D were defined. > > Then managed define uni200B in fontforge and it does seem to produce the > > same result even if the uni200B (ZWSP or DLB) is defined in the font or not. > > I'm speaking from ignorance here--I know nothing of the internal > workings of xetex--but it seems to me that the question of defining a > glyph for U+200B is beside the point. It should not, it seems to me, > have a glyph. Instead, xetex should break the line or not when it > encounters this code point, and then--regardless of the line > break--delete the character. It's a zero width character, and its > height is irrelevant (unlike a strut), so there's no shape to show. > -- > Mike Maxwell > "I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous > period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; > for time began with man." --Herman Melville, > Moby Dick
