From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sun Nov 23 2008 - 08:24:47 CST
Hans Aberg wrote:
> It is in fact even more complicated, because even it is called
> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
> one can have, as a matter of rendering style, the ring dipping into
> the main character, even being partly obscured. So one may not get
> around recognizing certain combination and provide special designs
> for those.
The letter Å is a rather special case, because it is particularly
challenging in font design. I daily see examples of texts where Å or (more
often) its lowercase equivalent å looks very poor, often almost
indistuishable from Å or å e.g. because the ring is drawn as much thinner
than everything else in the text. The uppercase letter suffers from the
problem that if the ring is reasonably large to be distinguishable, the
character may extend rather far beyond the limits of the font size. One of
my favorite examples in demonstrating the need for larger line height in
many cases is text with words like “Åberg” in the Verdana font—you can then
often see the ring cross the descenders of letters, unless line height is
larger than common defaults.
The letter Å exists as precomposed of course, and so do some even more
challenging letters like Å with acute, Ǻ. Yet, we have font problems with
them. We might have even more serious problems if they did not exist as
precomposed, but adding new precomposed characters is _not_ an option. What
you can do is to ask font designers and software designers to pay attention
to the combinability of characters and diacritic marks in rendering.
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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