Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters

From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sun Nov 23 2008 - 03:51:24 CST

  • Next message: Karl Pentzlin: "Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters"

    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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