The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

Hi!

I work on a translation project with some linguistics from Togo. They translate different texts into local languages, and in some of them they use both the diacritics accent and tilde on the same letter. I help them punch the texts into the computer, but to find this combination is not easy.

Eg. for the letter A the unicode could be U+0061U+0300U+0303
As you can see this doesn't look good at all: à̃
Not easy to see what it is supposed to be...

Are there other alternatives for us?

I've also drawn a small sample of how it should look like.

Well, you've got it backwards. It should be U+0061 a U+0303 ~ U+0300 `, for ã̀. The accent mark closest to the base letter comes before the accent marks further away. The best way to see if you can't get something more legible is to experiment with fonts. Some of them do better at stacking accents than others.

Thanks for the answer!

So I actually don't see the big difference, it is still hard to see what it is supposed to be. To play around with fonts will not help, as it will be used at a website and I can't control what kind of fonts people that visit the website use.

Actually, you can at least suggest good fonts to display a given text, using cascading style sheets' font-face attribute. I don't actually remember off the top of my head the exact formatting, but you can use it with text spanning tags like <p> or <tt>. So if they have one of the good fonts you've identified, they'll see it by default.