Re: [Groff] Permissible characters for hyphenation

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Hello!

John Gardner <address@hidden> wrote:
 |> 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.

Yes.  For display purposes however i think U+00AD can't be used
directly, but will be replaced by the renderer to either nothing,
if no wrap is to be applied at the character position, or
something appropriate, like ASCII hyphen-minus or some extended
Unicode "Pd" letter, of which there are some (e.g., U+058A
ARMENIAN HYPHEN, U+1400 CANADIAN SYLLABICS HYPHEN, and more).

 |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.

I am, for one, sure that the HTML standard committee will someday
manage to add markup for shitty baby napkins.  The palms and
beaches of their happenings seem to promote this direction. ^.^

--steffen