Re: More on Meteg and CGJ

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 19:18:12 EDT

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    At 03:16 PM 7/29/2003, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

    >How about:
    >
    > shin < regular meteg < CGJ < hataf < dagesh < shindot
    >
    >The CGJ prevents the reordering of the meteg around the hataf and
    >dagesh, and the sequence <meteg, CGJ, hataf> gives the font
    >a separate sequence to ligate, distinguishing it from
    ><hataf, dagesh, meteg> above.

    The meteg need to be to the left of, i.e. after, the hataf vowel:

    shin < hataf < CGJ <meteg <dagesh <shindot

    I can make this work, although it requires some fancy footwork in the font:
    I need to remove the CGJ in order not to confuse the mark positioning
    lookups, but do so without producing the same glyph string that results in
    the medial meteg ligatation with the hataf vowel. This can be done by
    including a second, unencoded meteg glyph in the font and substituting this
    for the regular meteg whenever preceded by CGJ, then the CGJ is removed and
    the new meteg positioned. [Not exactly tidy: since apps like InDesign
    started presenting glyph sets to the user, I'm less happy about including
    duplicate and potentially confusing glyphs.] In VOLT expressions:

             #ccmp feature
                     #Second meteg lookup
                     meteg -> meteg.2
                     #in context:
                     CGJ |

                     #Remove CGJ lookup
                     <Any glyph> CGJ -> <Any glyph>

    I *think* I can make pretty much any sequence involving CGJ work by
    removing the CGJ glyph as an appropriately early stage in glyph processing:
    it does its job in character ordering and then gets ditched in display,
    having triggered any glyph substitutions necessary for further processing.
    However, as noted before, this is entirely dependent on CGJ being treated
    as a painted combining mark and *not* as an unpainted control character.
    I'm still *very* nervous about this proposed solution if there is a chance
    that applications will not paint this character.

    John Hudson

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

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