Subject: [xml2rfc] Line Wrapping Issues for text and nroff

From: "Jim Schaad" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 15:19:29 -0800

I have fixes to table layout code done, and am working out the test suite
for it right now.

When I get finished with this, then I will need to go onto do some work in
the line wrapping code to get the rest of the table bugs finished, as well
as the general line wrapping issues.

There are some very big differences between the current line wrapping code
and the tcl version of the same.  Some of these are just interesting and
some of them are going to be possibly problematic going forward.

.         What is the word jointer character used for?  (This is in Unicode
\u2060 and is marked as a zero with space.)  Do we have practical uses of
this occurring in documents today?  Do we expect to see it show up in future
documents.  The current TCL code has a hack around this character will not
work going forward as we allow for non-ascii characters to appear in
documents.  From the description and the code I understand how it is to be
rendered, however I would expect that it is a searching item to mark the end
of words and thus don't know how useful it is.  (Note this is not the same
as the non-breaking space character which does have width.)

.         What is the prognosis going forward with allowing for non-ASCII
characters in document.  This especially with reference to those with
combining forms.  For example, "u\u0308" is the same as &uuml; or "\u00fc".
However we are trying to do line wrapping, center or right alignment, we are
counting code points and not worrying about which are zero width and which
are not zero width.  My guess is that you will say that we can ignore this
issue for the mean time as there are not enough examples for us to deal
with, but it may become an issue in the future.  

.         TCL will break on the standard hyphen character, but not on the
non-breaking hyphen character (by default).  It does look for the pattern of
a single character on either side of the hyphen and thus will not do
anything with a-foobar or foobar-a but will do co-op.  

Jim