Re: Small Latin Letter m with Macron

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Jan 17 2003 - 00:35:22 EST

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: Small Latin Letter m with Macron"

    At 01:59 AM 1/16/2003, Otto Stolz wrote:

    >Kenneth Whistler wrote:
    >>Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations
    >>should not be encoded as characters. The text should just
    >>be represented as "m" + "m". Then, if you wish to *render*
    >>such text in a font which mimics this style of handwriting
    >>and uses such abbreviations, then you would need the font
    >>to ligate "mm" sequences into a *glyph* showing an "m" with
    >>an overbar.
    >
    >This will not work, as all 'mm' occurences are not written as
    >m-overbar. E. g., G. Keller's "Die drei gerechten Kammacher"
    ><http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/keller/seldwyla/kammachr/kammachr.htm>
    >could not be written with m-overbar, as the two "m" characters
    >belong to different syllables; in modern orthography, you would
    >write "Kammmacher", or -- if you wish so -- Ka<m-overbar>macher.

    Ken's suggestion works fine, but only on discreetly selected runs of text.
    In other words, it would be up to the user *not* to apply the glyph
    substitution layout feature in the circumstances Otto describes. I drafted
    an OpenType Layout feature description last year for a Scribal Contractions
    feature to do exactly this sort of thing, but I recommended to MS and Adobe
    that it not be included in version 1.4 of the OT spec because I think the
    issues need to be better understood before publishing a general solution.
    Obviously this is not a plain text solution: markup is required.

    John Hudson

    Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

    A book is a visitor whose visits may be rare,
    or frequent, or so continual that it haunts you
    like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
                            - al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals



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