Jeff Kenton wrote:
W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
Strunk and White's _Elements of Style_ is another key authority on
English-language writing style. It defines exactly the rules I expected:
http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html#8
I suspect that this is about as authoritative as we will find.
There are more detailed guidelines, used by hyphenation software and
documented in various places. And then there are pairs of words with
identical spellings, but different pronunciation and hyphenation
requirements. re-cord (the verb) and rec-ord (the noun) come to mind.
There's even a name for these, though I've forgotten it. No cure in
that case short of grammatical analysis.
Note that my question isn't about hyphenation--that's a solved problem.
My question is about line breaks between, in particular,
non-alphanumeric characters (e.g., punctuation) and alphanumerics.
Breaks between punctuation and following non-blank, non-numeric
characters is not explicitly disallowed by the Unicode Annex 14 rules,
probably because non-Western languages need this to be allowed.
So while those of us whose first language is a Western one just know
that you break at spaces and hyphenation points exclusively, non-native
speakers may not know this. It is probably a reflection of Western
cultural imperialism that this type of rule is not defined or discussed
in any obvious place (outside the context of the typesetting program
implementations) while Asian line breaking rules are well discussed in a
number of easy-to-find places.
Cheers,
E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber
ISOGEN International, LLC
eliot(_at_)isogen(_dot_)com
www.isogen.com
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