Re: Caron / Hacek?

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2003 - 12:51:13 EST

  • Next message: Pim Blokland: "Re: Caron / Hacek?"

    At 01:49 AM 3/7/2003, Pim Blokland wrote:

    >Ah yes, the cedillas; now these are ambiguous!
    >What is the "correct form" for cedillas under N, K, L, R, S and T? What
    >should these look like? The fonts I've seen disagree on all of them: some
    >have commas, others have "real" cedillas.
    >Since Unicode 3.0 came out with its new code points 0218..021B (S and T with
    >comma below), it has been my conviction that 015E..015F and 0162..0163
    >should look like S and T with real cedillas.
    >Am I wrong in that assumption? Even some fonts which have, for instance,
    >021A (T with comma below) defined, make 0162 (T with cedilla) look like a T
    >with an under comma.
    >Now I must admit, I haven't come across many texts which used Ts with
    >cedillas. Not in printed form, that is; the only ones I have seen were in
    >electronic form, where their appearance depends on the font used.

    Okay, here we go...

    K, L, N, R with comma* below for Latvian
    *Note that this doesn't mean use the comma glyph, which is usually too
    large; the characteristic of this mark is that it may resemble a comma, but
    definitely is not attached to the base glyph and has a perceivable curve.

    S with cedilla below for Turkish (and some other Turkic languages)

    S, T with comma* below for Romanian

    As John Cowan points out, the T with cedilla is not used for any language,
    although I think a case could be made that it could be used for Gagauz
    Turkish because their current Latin orthography, which uses S with cedilla
    and T with comma, looks really weird.

    The most problematical part of this is that 8-bit codepages supporting
    Romanian use the old S and T with *cedilla* codepoints, not the new S and T
    with comma codepoints. We resolve this in OpenType fonts by use the
    Localised Forms <locl> layout feature to substitute the S and T with comma
    glyphs for the default S and T with cedilla glyphs, so that documents
    created using the former characters for Romanian will display correctly.
    This is not supported in applications yet, but will be soon.

    John Hudson

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

    It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
    the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
    to make them available to us, either by argument
    or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467



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