Re: missing characters: combining marks above runs of more than 2 base letters

On 11/18/2011 11:21 AM, Peter Cyrus wrote:
> Ken, you mention "defined markup constructions", but nothing would
> prevent specialized rendering software from, for example, connecting a
> left half mark with the corresponding right half mark via titlo, even
> though the text is still only plain text with no markup, right? The
> titlo would simply not display as such in the absence of the right
> software.

Correct. "Specialized rendering software" can pretty much do whatever
its programmers
want it to do.

But there would be no reason to limit that to what it could do with the
hacky left-
and right-half marks, either.

"Specialized rendering software" could detect a sequence <letter,
combining titlo, letter,
letter>, decide the three letters constituted a Cyrillic number and draw
the titlo
over all three letters as well. Or a "specialized" Cyrillic font could
contain ligatures
which would do the same, without requiring specialized code in a
rendering engine.

The problem would be there will be people who would expect such
specialized rendering
to be specified *in* the standard and be supported by *non*-specialized
rendering
engines and fonts, because their multi-letter titlos don't display
"correctly" when posted
on websites and viewed by people who don't have specialized rendering
software
or specialized fonts.

That's when the answer has to be no. At that point, the responsibility
really falls on
the folks who need to score text to define the higher-level protocols to
do so, and then
convince the people who want to support that kind of text convention to
do the
implementation(s) required to make it happen.

--Ken
Received on Fri Nov 18 2011 - 13:49:20 CST