Re: General Categories Pe, Pf, Pi, Ps

Kent,

with respect to Markus' reply:

On 1/24/2026 9:23 AM, Markus Scherer via Unicode wrote:
>
>     For “ambiguous” quote marks (and for that matter apostrophes also
>     when not used as quotation marks) and line breaking
>     I have proposed an update to the Unicode line breaking rules (not
>     language/typographic tradition dependent) in
>     https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25261r-line-breaking.pdf.
>
>     That should take care of the line breaking issue (very annoying at
>     present) for “ambiguous” quote marks.
>
> About that, see L2/26-006 
> <https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2026/26006-utc186-properties-recs.pdf> = 
> https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2026/26006-utc186-properties-recs.pdf 
> section 4.1 / page 11.

the key here is that Unicode is shifting away from accepting proposals 
that simply say: "this is (obviously) a better way", in favor of case 
studies that provide concrete examples of (in this case, bad 
linebreaks), preferably observed in practice rather than reconstructed.

The reason is that the algorithm is now widely deployed and we've 
already run into the situation that fixing something in response to user 
complaints has made support for other orthographies worse.

We need to better understand how "bad" the current approach is and what 
issues it causes, but this needs to be in some detail, so we can better 
judge both the benefit and the cost in affecting other orthographies.

If the changes made in version 15.1 do adversely affect particular 
languages that may not have been on the radar, we would like to know 
about that but we'd like to see the case studies, not simply the 
conclusions.

A./