Soft-dotted (was: RE: Unicode Public Review Issues update)

From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@cs.chalmers.se)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 07:33:54 EDT

  • Next message: Pim Blokland: "Accented ij ligatures (was: Unicode Public Review Issues update)"

    Re. the ij ligature and soft-dottedness:

    This is a compatibility letter, both in the sense that it has a
    compatibility mapping
    and is taken from a “legacy” character encoding. It is, however, not
    necessarily a
    character that should not be used. Even though in most cases it is
    sufficient to use
    ordinary i and j in sequence to write the Dutch ij, in some cases it may
    still be best
    to use the ij ligature character, for best spacing, titlecasing, and
    vertical layout.

    This was discussed on this list a while ago. Also discussed on this
    list was the following:

    The ij can in some cases be acute accented, in which case both of the
    dots should
    be replaced by acute accents. The representation of this is quite
    straightforward if
    ordinary i and j are used. If, however, the ij ligature is used, the ij
    ligature must first
    of all be soft-dotted. Applying just ordinary combining acute accent to
    produce an
    accent on each part of the ligature may be a bit strange. It may be
    more logical to
    apply combining double acute accent to the ij ligature to get the
    desired effect. A
    (small) typographic problem is to align the two acute accents over the
    constituent
    letter bodies. It is not certain that a grave accent may be applicable
    to the ij, but
    if it is, the story is similar. At least one Dutch dictionary (Ter
    Laan, Niew Groninger
    Wordenboek, 1929) uses a macron over the ij. If coded as separate i and
    j, one would
    use 035E;COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON in-between. If the ij ligature is
    used, a
    combining macron should be applied after the ligature character to get a
    macron
    that goes over both the dotless constituent letter bodies.

    In each of these cases (of accented ij ligature), the ij ligature must
    be soft-dotted.

    > Interesting issue for the Latin Small "ij" Ligature (U+0133):
    > Normally the Soft_Dotted issupposed to make disappear one dot when
    > there's and additional diacritic above, but many applications may
    > keep these two dots above, fitting the diacritic in the middle.

    Examples? (Of actual use of such a letter+marks combination, not of
    applications that currently do what you say.)

    > This proposal would mean that this become illegal, and it promote the
    > use of an additional intermediate dot-above diacritic if the dot must
    > be kept.
    >
    > What would be the interpretation of this dot added on top of the
    > ligature? Should it be still a single dot centered above the "ij"

    Probably. Examples of use?

    > digraph, requiring two dots to be encoded if both "i" and "j" must
    > have their own dot above?

    They would stack on top of eachother (unless you want additional
    special rules, which seems very uncalled for).

    > Or would this require using a diaeresis instead centered above the
    > digraph?

    Probably. But are there any examples of this in use (ever, not
    necessarily
    Unicode encoded, or at all digitally encoded)? If that kind of thing
    never
    has occured before, it does not really matter very much, and some coarse
    approximation will do fine.

    > For the modifier letter j or Greek letter yot, this is less ambiguous.
    >
    > The proposal however is fine for the mathematical variants of i and j,
    > (including the double struck italic, for unification reasons)

    I think so too (though I don't know what you mean by "unification"
    here).
    But there are also cases where "math" diacritics go over a larger
    expression
    than just a single-letter variable name (the span being expressed via
    markup). It
    is probably not wise to automatically remove the dots on i's and j's in
    such cases.
    However, for cases where a "math" diacritic goes on top of just a
    single-letter
    i-like or j-like name, the dot should automatically be "removed" (or,
    rather,
    an alternate dotless glyph be used). For other cases, like
    "more-than-a-variable"
    expressions getting a diacritic, or when actual undotted i or j is
    desired
    (compare TeXs \imath and \jmath), dotless i and dotless j characters
    should
    be used. (But that is another matter, though related to the soft-dotted
    issue.)

                    /kent k

    > (Note I also posted this comment in the online report form)
    >
    > -- Philippe.
    >
    >



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