Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
That is all fine and well, but your coulda woulda shouldas aren't the way fonts work.
For example, it is entirely valid and within the defined purpose of font files to redefine a space as some arbitrary glyph. I can guarantee you there is someone, somewhere, who has good reasons to do just that... no matter how bad you may feel it looks.
There is no reason why rendering software should make a special exception just for *spaces to hardcode their definition rather than allow the font to define it. In fact, there is every reason NOT to.
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I know how fonts work. I've edited and customised a few with font editors over the years.
So I know you can put any glyph in any slot. But if you do it with a text font and not just a grabbag of symbols, it will screw up on the page.
There are excellent reasons for software to treat space characters specially, and they do, as I gave an example earlier. How else can it know where to wrap a string of text?
Layout software will break at a "space" regardless if you put a actual glyph there.
Anyway, all these "special" spaces could be created on the screen/page regardless if they have a slot in the font file. DTP page layout software does that. But ebook rendering is less predictable.