Re: UAX #14: Allowing breaks before en dashes

Hi Léane,

I cannot really help with the technical issue, but I think the logic is 
that traditionally it has been considered typographically bad to begin a 
line with a parenthetical dash.  The reasoning behind this seems to be 
that: a) if you use a comma for parenthesis, you will also not start the 
line with the leading comma:
                  ... Nous mangions des pommes
   , les plus rouges au monde, sous les arbres ...
b) A line starting with a dash gives you a more ragged impression of the 
left margin, which ought to look straight.  And c) A line starting with 
a dash might look as if you were making a bullet point list:
   – les plus rouges au monde,
   – les plus vertes au monde ...
So this is the traditional printers’ rule, and I guess it was taken over 
into Unicode.

But this is the logic of letterpress printing.  It can evolve.  When I 
typeset texts, I also often favor logical line-breaks, disregarding 
traditional typesetting rules.  For example, traditionally, when 
typesetting the heading of a chapter, one should not start a line with 
“of”.  So one ought to print:
   The long and winding history of
   typographical preferences
But nowadays I think not only I prefer to keep syntactic entities (in 
this case, prepositional phrases) together:
   The long and winding history
   of typographical preferences
So there seems to be a trend towards syntactic logic that overrules the 
old letterpress-printing rules.  In other words, a trend towards making 
it more important to use line breaks to help the reader understand the 
concrete sentence than having a ‘clean’ layout of the page as a whole. 
Your preference for the parenthetical dashes being on the same line as 
the parenthesis fits into this, and I think Unicode should allow this.

Best wishes,

Daniel

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Prof. Dr. Daniel Bunčić
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Slavisches Institut der Universität zu Köln
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