From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sun Nov 23 2008 - 03:51:24 CST
On 23 Nov 2008, at 05:45, Doug Ewell wrote:
> I think Karl may have expected that fonts could be developed in
> such a way that combining diacritical marks would be spaced
> properly above the base character, more or less by magic. I used
> to think that would be possible when I knew nothing about font
> design, instead of knowing almost nothing about font design as I do
> now.
>
> I still think it would be reasonable to expect combining marks like
> macrons and circumflexes to be always centered over the base
> character, not off to the right, even if the vertical spacing is
> wrong. Like I said, almost nothing.
I experimented a bit, one and a half decade ago, with creating the
Swedish letter Å (U00C5) in TeX, which then was necessary to do by
combining an A writing a small circle above it. It turns out to be
quite complicated, because characters may have a slant, to center the
circle on.
So one needs to have a more advanced font model, which for each
character contains information where to position combining
characters. I am not sure about the state of this matter - one can
have Chinese fonts that combine the radicals - so it ought to be
possible to do for the combining characters as well.
Hans
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