[Tagging] Nonbreakable spaces in name tags

Matej Lieskovský lieskovsky.matej at gmail.com
Fri Jan 26 14:48:42 UTC 2018


Greetings!

Several Slavic languages have rather formal rules about line breaks.
We in Czechia have a few contributors who take the time to add
nonbreakable spaces to names that "need" them. Needless to say, the
current situation is rather inconsistent, with nonbreakable spaces
occurring in the data but nowhere near being reliable. The local talk
is also divided on the topic of whether nonbreakable spaces should be
encouraged or removed.

We know that at least some renderers (including osm.org) actually make
use of the nonbreakable spaces. Nominatim does Unicode collation,
handling nonbreakable spaces well. Overpass does not and its
suspicious behaviour was what alerted us to the problem in the first
place.

Both having and not having nonbreakable spaces has its pros and cons.
The current state of uncertainty is the worst of both worlds. In an
attempt to find a resolution and prevent an edit war, we reached out
to the DWG, which did not solve the dispute. We now ask for opinions
here.

Thank you in advance,
Matej Lieskovský

PS: The rules are formal enough that there exists a 1997 program
"Vlna" ("Tilde"), that can add nonbreakable spaces to TeX source files
and is commonly used for important documents.



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