Diacriticals and descents in upper case (was: "Re: Caron / Hacek?")

From: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin (antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt)
Date: Wed Aug 13 2003 - 21:08:48 EDT

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    On 2003.06.12, 18:38, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:

    > Capital letters simply don't use ascents or descents, and thus they
    > occupy a *smaller* space than the lowercase letters.

    Some upper case letters commonly (i.e. in some "typical" fonts) have
    descents, especially, though not only, in italic style:

    U+0047 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G
    U+004A : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER J
    U+0051 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q
    U+005A : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z
    U+01B7 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EZH
    U+0396 : GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ZETA
    U+0414 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER DE
    U+0423 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER U
    U+0426 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER TSE
    U+0429 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHCHA
    U+046E : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER KSI

    > In some cases, there is no space in the font point size to put some
    > upper diacritics above the letter, and the diacritic will almost
    > always be written after the base character, sometimes with a distinct
    > glyph, if the printed lines must fit in narrow lines (to save paper in
    > books).

    This is indeed the current practice in Czech and Slovak, as said in the
    thread, but it's completely out of fashion to do so fo, at least,
    Portuguese. Nineteen century books do have "E’" for UC e-acute, but that
    has been replaced by "É" in all quality media for quite a long time.

    > the color of a font is not what you think:

    Note that what I think may not be what you think I think... ;-)

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