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

[Lou Burnard]

I own up to having made WD consistently use "codepoint", that being my 
preferred solution on grounds of least effort. On the other hand, a few 
minutes googling suggests that "code point" is indeed the preferred 
usage in Unicode documentation and wikipedia and other reputable 
websites. I don't think we have many cases of its being used 
adjectivally and could probably live with their being unhyphenated.

L

David Sewell wrote:
> 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
>
>
>