Re: Snippet 888 string, was Re: Lyric centre-on-word / ignore-punctuation bug

[David Wright]

On Sat 24 Feb 2018 at 20:27:58 (-0700), madMuze wrote:
> >> What I haven't figured out is why there are two long dashes
> 
> As davidK pointed out, three dash forms are probably desired: the hyphen,
> the N-dash, and the M-dash.

I didn't see him mention the hyphen, but it's all present and correct,
just after the question mark.

> It does look like an extra M-dash at the
> beginning of your string (or is that some character code masquerading as a
> dash?).

No, it's a genuine long dash, sorry, em-dash.

While driving to the Met opera cinema this morning, it occurred to me
why the extra dash was present. It's there because, just like Harm's
typographer’s single quote, someone added it to the beginning of the
string thinking it wasn't there; but it already was—in disguise.

> The space is there, not for the dash, but (I believe) in case one
> might enter "lyricSyllable " in quotes and including a space. Having the
> space character in space-set thus causes the space width to be ignored on
> centering.

I would have thought one would want the space to be treated like
a letter. This snippet is designed to treat a string like spqr—
as if it was spqr (with respect to centering). If you go to the
bother of adding space to make "  spqr—" and then centre it as if
it were spqr, the space has achieved nothing. OTOH treating space
as a letter makes it centre like xxspqr, which pushes spqr rightwards.

> For what it’s worth, I use this string for space-set (in ASCII
> order, if I recall):
>   " !()*,-./:;<>?[]`{|}‚„…‹‘’“”–—› ¡«»¿"
> 
> The obsessively astute will notice a non-breaking space just before the
> inverted bang. One might include numerals, if one wanted a sloppy way to
> indicate stanzas. Since the tilde creates a lyric tie, it is probably better
> left out of space-set.
> 
> This is a lovely and much-appreciated procedure. So long as the space-set
> string could be customized, making this default behavior in a future version
> would indeed contribute to the progress of civilization.

Cheers,
David.