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by jkwchui 1133 days ago
Technically yes, but the general public probably doesn't have a concept of zero-width space.

(For everyone else wonder what ackfoobar is proposing: let's take the phrase (if you don't read Chinese, just treat them as shapes) 香港地少人多, properly segmented, is 香港.地少.人多. The font treats this incorrectly, because "香港地" is a commonly used fragment, the 地 in the fragment have a special sound, and parsing as 香港地.少.人多 gives a mistaken sound for 地.

Ackfoobar is absolutely correct that we can coerce the correct reading by going 香港[ ]地少人多 --- where the [ ] is an invisible spacer. My contention is that most users don't know how to do that in their favorite word processor.

Someone is probably thinking, could you add "香港地少" as a fragment? Purist says it's not pretty, but I'm a pragmatist, so I did do many of these patching. Doing this or not relies on some acumen as a native speaker, and there were hundreds of these decisions made. This language knowledge would be necessary if someone were to do Mandarin (or Thai or, ...))