[tei-council] how to encode a hyphen at the end of a line, column, or page when you are encoding hyphens

Lou Burnard lou.burnard at retired.ox.ac.uk
Wed Jan 5 16:06:50 EST 2011


On 05/01/11 17:03, Martin Holmes wrote:

>
> Do we believe that the existence of a hyphen, doubling, etc. should be
> expressed through character data external to the break, or should it be
> expressed through @rend? In other words:
>
> help-<lb/>ful
>
> or
>
> help<lb rend="hyphen"/>ful
>

I fear I don't think this is a question for voting on. It is clear, if 
you look back through the discussion, that there is simply no consensus 
in the community. For some people, it's obvious that you must try to 
preserve the way hyphenation occurs in the text; for others, it's 
equally obviously either of no importance or entirely counter productive 
to do so. Very good and persuasive reasons can be amassed on either 
side, and  have been.

But this shouldn't depress us! We should simply recognise it  is another 
instance of the generally liberal attitude the Guidelines try to defend. 
Peoples' needs and priorities vary. I think we can still provide helpful 
guidance by saying:

1. You should probably not falsify the text, so do distinguish in some 
way "helpful" which has been split across a line break from "helpful" 
which has not been so divided

2. It's up to you whether you want to indicate the presence of the 
"metacharacter" hyphen (or whatever) and there are two ways you could do 
that:

(a) symbolically (@rend="hyphen")

(b) explicitly (in which case you need to find the right Unicode character)

This is almost exactly what we already recommend for quotation marks:
we provide explicit tags to distinguish "quoted" from quoted (several of 
them, in fact); you can retain the quote marks themselves if you like; 
you can replace them with a description supplied as the value for @rend.

Each of us will have their own preferences, and these may well be 
different for different types of text or different types of application. 
I don't think that's a disaster, is it?




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