[kbd] Please support narrow no-break space (U+202F)

[Nicolas Delvaux]

Le dimanche 29 août 2010 à 23:52 +0100, Ken Moffat a écrit :

> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:32:28AM +0200, Nicolas Delvaux wrote:
> > 
> > Indeed, it's logical, thanks.
> > 
> > As a side note to this "feature request", there are other Unicode spaces
> > you might want to support: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_%
> > 28punctuation%29#Table_of_spaces
> > I let you see, personally I just need narrow non-break spaces. ;-)
> > 
> > Nicolas
> 
>  As a side-note to the request, you can change your local psfu fonts
> using psftools (from freshmeat if your distro doesn't supply it):
> txt2psf to reproduce the font in a text form ('-' for blank pixels,
> '#' for lit pixels),
> 
>  edit it to add more characters to the space glyph - e.g.
> 
> Unicode: [00000020];[000000a0];[0000202f];
> 
>  (to add U+202f to an existing U+00a0).
> 
>  and then txt2psf to convert the altered file to a psfu font.

Thanks for the tip.


>  I was interested to see your request, and _surprised_ that you have
> this character mapped on your keyboard.

On the French default keyboard layout of most distro, this character is
mapped to "Alt Gr + v".
There are probably similar mapping in some other layouts but I don't
know the details.


>   I thought people would just
> type a regular space - shows how little I know.

Well, French translators are used to use non-break spaces instead of narrow non-break spaces because of technical reasons.

I did some testing recently to figure out if we could change our
translations guidelines to adopt nnbsp now and I found that there are
only 2 single bugs that prevents nnbsp to be used massively in French
translations:

- A rendering bug in Qt apps (Qt built-in text layout engine?)
- A rendering bug in TTY (kbd)

Of course we could keep non-break spaces or even use regular spaces in
CLI translations, but it's way easier for us to not have to wonder each
time if a string may be displayed in a CLI and so in a TTY.
So we should be able to use nnbsp in any case. Hope you see the
point. ;-)


Regards,
Nicolas
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