[20848] in Athena Bugs
Re: mozilla elides keypad dashes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Wed Oct 2 19:47:26 2002
To: bug-infoagents@mit.edu
Cc: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>
From: Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Date: 02 Oct 2002 19:45:24 -0400
In-Reply-To: <bugs:20842@unknown-discuss-server>
Message-ID: <w6my99gs8vf.fsf@multics.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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<jweiss@MIT.EDU> (Jonathon Weiss) writes:
> If you compare http://diswww.mit.edu/menelaus/hotline/61602 in mozilla
> and netscape, you'll notice that in the summary line at the top and
> again in the body the dash disappears in the 540 number.
The short answer is: don't use soft hyphens (0xAD). They're only
supposed to be visible at ends-of-lines.
The medium answer is that this is a long-standing "issue" with
mozilla -- the bug is old enough to have a 4-digit bug number:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9101
The longer answer is:
Those "elided" dashes have character code of 0xAD (U+00ad) in the
file. This is specified as a "soft hyphen" in both the iso-8859-1
and Unicode standards, but the standards conflict over whether it
is supposed to be a printing character. The official Unicode
position is that it is a discretionary hyphen -- it marks the
place where the rendering agent is allowed to break a word for
line-wrapping.
Mozilla still has a bug in that it *never* displays the hyphen,
even if it could word-wrap the line at that point, but the hiding
of the hyphen when it's not at a word-wrap point is considered a
feature and not a bug.
(Check the page in Internet Explorer, and you'll notice that you
can resize the window and get IE to display the hyphen when the
window is sized to force a line-wrap at that point.)
More reading:
Description of ISO Latin 1 characters:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/3.html#AD
Writup specifically about problems with soft hyphen:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html
