Re: soft hyphen

[Bruno Haible]

Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> > The program below shows that the answer (on a glibc system) is:
> > The character 0x00AD (= SOFT HYPHEN) is printable but has width == 0.
> 
> I tried printing this on several terminals; all actually render 
> something that is one character position wide.
> 
> A program which calculates column positions on a terminal will be wrong 
> if 0xAD has been printed, and it relies on this bogus datum from glibc.

Quoting the Unicode standard:
  "Despite its name, U+00AD soft hyphen is not a hyphen, but rather an
   invisible format character used to indicate optional intraword breaks.
   As described in Section 23.2, Layout Controls, its effect on the
   appearance of the text depends on the language and script used."

Yes, this has changed since the ISO-8859-1 times [1], and software needed/needs
to move from the old semantics to the Unicode semantics.

Bruno

[]] http://unicode.org/L2/L2003/03155r-kuhn-soft-hyphen.pdf