Subject: Re: [PATCH] Unicode: update of combining code points

From: Kevin Bracey <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 09:32:34 +0300

On 16/04/2014 22:58, Torsten Bögershausen wrote:
> Excellent, thanks for the pointers.
> Running the script below shows that
> "0X00AD SOFT HYPHEN" should have zero length (and some others too).
> I wonder if that is really the case, and which one of the last 2 lines
> in the script is the right one.
>
> What does this mean for us:
> "Cf 	Format 	a format control character"
>
Maybe dig back through the Git logs to check the original logic, but the 
comments suggest that "Cf" characters have been viewed as zero-width. 
That makes sense - they're usually markers indicating things like 
bidirectional text flow, so won't be taking space. (Although they may be 
causing even more extreme layout effects...)

Soft-hyphen is noted as an explicit exception to the rule in the utf8.c 
comments. As of Unicode 4.0, it's supposed to be a character indicating 
a point where a hyphen could be placed if a line-wrap occurs, and if 
that wrap happens, then it can actually take up 1 space, otherwise not. 
So its width could be either 0 or 1, depending. Or, quite likely, the 
terminal doesn't treat it specially, and it always just looks like a 
hyphen... Thus we err on the safe side and give it width 1.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen for background.

The comments suggest adding "-00AD +1160-11FF" to the uniset command 
line for that tweak and for composing Hangul. (The +200B tweak isn't 
necessary any more - Zero-Width Space U+200B became Cf officially in 
Unicode 4.0.1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space
http://www.unicode.org/review/resolved-pri.html#pri21
)

All of this is only really an approximation - a best-effort attempt to 
figure out the width of a string without any actual communication with 
the display device. So it'll never be perfect. The choice between double 
and single width in particular will often be unpredictable, unless you 
had deeper locale knowledge.

Actually, while doing this, I've realised that this was originally 
Markus Kuhn's implementation, and that is acknowledged at the top of the 
file:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/wcwidth.c

Good, because he knows what he's doing.

Kevin