Re: Invisible line break

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** 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.]

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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