Re: support figure space (U+2007)

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> I suggest that texinfo adds
>>
>> ```
>> \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{2007}{\hphantom{0}}
>> ```
>>
>> to support the figure space.  This would allow the emulation of
>> right-aligned number columns in tables, for example.
>>
>>      1  foo
>>    101  bar
>>
>> The nice thing is that it would work out of the box with HTML
>> browsers, too.
>
> Do you need this for some document?

Yes, to prettify a table in one of LilyPond's manuals.

>> On the other hand, maybe there could be some further massaging to
>> convert U+2007 to an ordinary space entity together with some
>> formatting CSS so that cut-and-paste don't contain U+2007.
>
> This sounds complicated.

Well, I'm not sure how to handle any of the Unicode space characters
to be friendly to cut-and-paste – the main question is whether it is
the job of texi2html to do anything at all.  Those special space
characters *are* useful everywhere, with the exception of the command
line, where you normally need ordinary spaces.

> In Info output I suppose it should be output as just a plain space
> character, without line breaking.

Yes.  Or simply do nothing special :-)

> It makes me wonder if the next thing after this is to support all
> kinds of alignments in tables.
>
> It would seem to make more sense to have some way of specifying the
> alignment of a column rather than adding special figure spaces which
> then would have to removed from the output if anybody wanted to copy
> and paste.

I'm all for it.  However, solving table column alignment in texinfo is
a non-trivial issue.  What I suggest is just a simple add-on that has
some practical advantages while being backward compatible with other
formats.


     Werner