Re: Invisible line break

["cmadsen" cmadsen@xxxxxxxx]

I can't remember my original email in response to this question. I don't
think it had to do with the dishy. It did involve the separator table by
adding a non-printing character to the word separator line. Then Patricia
would have to type in that character where ever she wants the line break.
For example (and this is not a working example), let's say the character "^"
is non-printing. (We know it is, and we know that it's already part of the
separator table, but we are pretending here.) Patricia would add ^ to the
word line in the separator table. Then, when she wanted to be able to break
around an en dash, she would type:

    1970^[en dash]^1976

This would yield one of three results:

    1970[en dash]1976

    1970[en dash]
    1976

    1970
    [en dash]1976


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holmgren" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2003 1:50 AM
Subject: Re: Invisible line break


> ** Reply to message from "cmadsen"  on Fri, 28
Feb
> 2003 19:59:08 -0500
>
> Chris:
>
> I'm lost -- please help me out here. No matter what character I assign to
the
> soft (discretionary) hyphen (VAriable DH), when and if hyphenation
actually
> occurs, a real hyphen (Ascii 45) is printed to paper. If I correctly
> understand Patricia's goal, she wants to replace the printed hyphen with
an
> "invisible" character. Off the top of my head, there would be two ways to
do
> that. You could use *any* character as long as it had width=0. Or, you
could
> replace the "real hyphen" Ascii-45 with some other character, i.e. a nul
> (Ascii-0) or an Ascii-255 or an Ascii-32 (space)? But both of those
strategies
> presuppose that there exists a mechanism which can replace the printed
hyphen
> with some other character -- and AFAIK, there isn't any such mechanism.
What
> role would the separator table play there? Seems irrelevant to me.
>
> Now, if you're just narrowly trying to get XyWrite to recognize an en or
em
> dash as a word separator, and hence to perform a natural break at that
point --
> OK sure: adding em or en to an SE table would enable line wraps, when
> appropriate, after those two characters. But it isn't a systemic solution
to
> replacing the discretionary hyphen with something invisible. I don't know
how
> to do that -- I don't believe it is possible.
>
> [P.S. Patricia says she doesn't want to replace the hyphen with a space
> character. I don't understand why not. If hyphenation didn't occur, you
> wouldn't see it. If hyphenation did occur, you also wouldn't see it, at
least
> not on paper.]
>
> -----------------------------
> Robert Holmgren
> holmgren@xxxxxxxx
> -----------------------------
>
>