Pseudo-OT request for feedback on line breaking

[Jeff Walden]

There's some discussion in bug 389595 about line breaking with respect to '(' and ')'. The current decision sounds like it's going to take into account Japanese and English; it'd be good if people who write/speak other languages could describe how line breaking is done in those other languages, if they differ from the behavior proposed in the bug (which, to be honest, I don't even understand from the bug discussion, or I'd try to summarize it here).

Please post comments to bug 389595, please; I'm just the bystander who figured it might make sense to ask some people who might not otherwise see the bug and whose knowledge could be helpful in reaching the best solution. :-)

Jeff

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

On 7/26/07, Jeff Walden <jwald...@mit.edu> wrote:
> There's some discussion in bug 389595 about line breaking with respect to '(' and ')'. The current decision sounds like it's going to take into account Japanese and English; it'd be good if people who write/speak other languages could describe how line breaking is done in those other languages, if they differ from the behavior proposed in the bug (which, to be honest, I don't even understand from the bug discussion, or I'd try to summarize it here).
>
> Please post comments to bug 389595, please; I'm just the bystander who figured it might make sense to ask some people who might not otherwise see the bug and whose knowledge could be helpful in reaching the best solution. :-)

Jeff, I ran this past the TLUG (Tokyo Linux Users Group), a fantastic
resource for anyone linux-oriented, and not necessarily limited in
membership to people living in Japan.

Anyway, the upshot is a thoughtful reply by Stephen Turnbull, which I
paste below:

/begin inserted email/
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <ste...@xemacs.org>
Subject: [tlug] line-breaking in Japanese with '(' and ')'?

Gernot Hassenpflug writes:

> On the dev-l10n list there is a discussion about how to do
> line-breaking in Japanese with '(' and ')' characters. I haven't seen
> any rules for those characters particularly, does anyone know if they
> count as punctuation in the same way as the Japanese full-stop and
> comma?

No. "Parentheses" (i.e., including quotation marks) bind to the enclosed
text the same as in English. Closing parentheses thus behave
identically to the full stop and reading point.

> Or alternatively, any documentation on this, I am at a loss as what
> exactly to search for in Japanese here.

Kinsoku or 禁則. In other words, "regulations about forbidden
breaks."

See also Unicode TR#14 <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/> and the
appropriate tables. That's current (version 19); the draft process is
up to version 21, but none of the changes affect Japanese.
/end inserted email/

I hope this helps. Best regards,
Gernot
--
Gernot Hassenpflug