[tei-council] Guidelines: "code point" vs. "codepoint" vs. "code-point"

[David Sewell]

All,

I've been doing some cleanup for consistency of usages in the
Guidelines. Almost all of the decisions are straightforward and
noncontroversial, but there's one that needs input from everyone: the
spelling to use for "code point" in the sense of a value in a character
set.

There are three possible choices:

	1. codepoint (noun and adjective)
	2. code point (n.) but code-point (adj.)
	   [contrast "a code point" vs. "a code-point value"]
	3. code-point (n. and adj.)

The Guidelines are wildly inconsistent. Chapter 5, "Representation of
Non-standard Characters and Glyphs", uses "codepoint" throughout.
In the other chapter where the term occurs a lot, chapter vi "Languages
and Character Sets", "code point" appears 11 times and "code-point" 45
times (mostly as a noun), but no "codepoint".

"Code point" for the noun form seems prevalent in technical usage. That
is the form given in the Unicode Consortium's online glossary
(http://unicode.org/glossary/#C). One problem with treating it as two
words, though, is that the English convention of hyphenating compounds
in adjectival use ("a code-point value") is not always easy to follow,
i.e. some uses are ambiguous between noun and adjective function.

Does anyone have strong feelings one way or another about this? If the
Guidelines were a static document I'd lean toward #2, but it's easier to
maintain documentation if you don't have to apply grammatical criteria.
>From that point of view "codepoint" is the simplest solution.

I'd like to commit my changes before Sebastian's deadline of 1 Feb, but
I won't touch codepoint/code-point/code point without some feedback.

David


-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
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