Re: Vai word boundaries and line breaking

At 13:16 -0800 2007-11-30, Peter Constable wrote:
>Reading through the proposal documents for Vai, it's not entirely 
>clear from the text or the samples what the line breaking behaviour 
>is in relation to word boundaries. I'm wondering if I can get some 
>clarification.
>
>Generally, the examples make it look as though spaces are not used 
>in text at word or phrase boundaries (making Vai reminiscent of Han 
>ideographs in this regard), though it's not absolutely clear. 
>L2/05-159R (N2984R) has only one sample of running text - the rest 
>show syllable charts and such. L2/05-053 show samples suggesting 
>some variation in marking word boundaries - some of the samples seem 
>to have variable spacing between letterforms so it's also not clear 
>to me from this doc if spaces are ever used.

Modern Vai always uses spaces between words. As in the Bible I have 
here. Manuscript Vai is less scrupulous about this, but the Right 
Thing To Do is treat the syllables like Cherokee syllables... that 
is, like Latin letters.

>L2/05-159R has a section on line breaking that indicates that line 
>breaks are not permitted before SYLLABLE LENGTHENER or before NG. 
>Looking at the beta UCD files, though, it appears that NG (A60B) has 
>the same line breaking property as regular syllables (AL); it's not 
>clear to me if that's intended or not.

That is Ken's bailiwick I guess.

>The LENGTHENER (A60C) has linebreak = EX, as does FULL STOP (A60E); 
>this strongly blocks break before. COMMA (060D) and QUESTION MARK 
>(A60F) have linebreak = BA, which less-strongly blocks break before. 
>(EX allows preceding break only after hard line break or ZWSP; BA 
>also allows a preceding break after spaces (SP) or FFFC).

I can't say I know how to evaluate this.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com