Subject: bug#20871: 25.0.50; fill-single-char-nobreak-p does not recognize a single-letter word when it is preceded by an open paren

From: Michał Nazarewicz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2019 16:36:15 +0100

> > From: Michał Nazarewicz <[email-masked]>
> > Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2019 15:07:56 +0100

> > As discussed previously, ‘fill-single-char-nobreak-p’ and
> > ‘fill-polish-nobreak-p’ and serve pretty much the same purpose.  When
> > I wrote the former I had Polish typography in mind and obviously the
> > latter is meant to handle the same case.  As such, having those two
> > functions don’t provide much option to the user.

On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 at 16:01, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
> If both functions attempt to produce the same behavior, then yes, we
> need only one.  But then wouldn't we need a second one, to produce the
> behavior expected, say, in US English?

The expected behaviour for US English is achieved by not using the
function at all.

Unless you mean that someone want to follow the rule in English even
though it’s not an established thing in that language.  In that case
they can just use the existing functions and they will work for
English.

In that case I could see a potential reason to have multiple
functions:
- ‘fill-polish-nobreak-p’ – don’t break after a, e, i, o, u, w or z;
- ‘fill-czech-nobreak-p’ – don’t break after a, i, k, o, s, u, v or z;
  and
– ‘fill-single-char-nobreak-p’ – don’t break after any single letter
  word.
This can also be achieved by a single function and a variable listing
all the characters.

Note also that there is a different rule which applies to all
languages which deals with breaking line between number and
a unit, e.g. ‘60 s’, ‘100 m’ etc.  I’m not sure how this fits with
current discussion since neither tildify nor the *-nobreak-p functions
deal with that case.

> > > I'm also okay with extending tildify.el to support more than just
> > > Czech rules, but that's a separate issue.
> >
> > The differences between Czech and Polish can largely be ignored.
>
> I didn't mean Polish, I meant in general languages where the
> conventions are different.  Surely, there are some, and tildify
> explicitly assumes that.

I don’t think there are.  It is possible that I’m incorrect but all
the materials I’ve found talked about Polish and Czech only.  Polish
Wikipedia entry¹ explicitly states that this rule is only for those two
languages.

¹ https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierotka_(typografia) (note that
  ‘sierotka’ literally translates to ‘orphan’ but is a different thing
  than ‘orphan’ in English typography).

--
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ミハウ “𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓪86” ナザレヴイツ
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