Re: Accents of the same combining class displayed side by side

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Nov 07 2008 - 03:21:37 CST

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Boustrophedon (was: Re: Question about the directionality of "Old Hungarian" (document N3531))"

    On 7 Nov 2008, at 09:11, Asmus Freytag wrote:

    >> There is no real problem, if you want to do it this way, providing
    >> that there is no push-back when we propose pre-composed some side-
    >> by-side diacritical marks. (We already have precedent for this in a
    >> few UPA diacritical marks, so perhaps this will not be problematic.)
    >
    > Actually, there should be some push-back :-)

    Of course there will be. Just as there was for the UPA. It's hardly a
    surprise.

    > Like with accents above, the amount of room underneath a character
    > is limited, so that one would expect the *normal* typographic
    > treatment of narrow and tall accents below to be side-by-side,
    > simply for space reasons. A raw stacking behavior would then be
    > rather in the nature of a fallback mechanism for poor man's fonts
    > and layout systems. In other words, whenever you propose side-by-
    > side diacriticals you should have to make the case that the stacked
    > alternative really exists, and really must be distinguishable from
    > the side-by-side case.

    Asmus, it's not as though I don't know this.

    > When you proposed the UPA, this appeared to a be an isolated special
    > case. If you are trying to encode all of the possible combinations
    > of diacritics above and below as precomposed entities, I think you
    > are making the encoding handle something that belongs on the display
    > side.

    We would be proposing to encode attested combinations in use. The
    problem with saying it's just for display is that there's no mechanism
    for the user to choose between both stacking and side-by-side
    diacritics, and both options are required in these phonetic
    orthographies.

    > On the contrary, all Latin characters that are the same base plus
    > same accents as one of the "Vietnamese" characters will render the
    > same, unless you support language specific glyph adjustments.

    That's not going to work very easily because the context is dialectal.
    Moreover, I don't know if even I have any software that makes use of
    this language-specific workaround. Does it work in web browsers?

    Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 07 2008 - 03:23:21 CST