From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 17:03:56 EDT
Peter Kirk <peter dot r dot kirk at ntlworld dot com> wrote:
> Point taken. But when different fonts and rendering engines give
> different results because the standard is unclear or ambiguous, that
> is a matter for the discussion here. And when conforming fonts and
> rendering engines fail to give the required results, that may also be
> because of a deficiency in the standard.
Or it may not. It may be a deficiency in the level of Unicode support
afforded by the fonts and rendering engines. It may simply reflect a
difference between your "requirements" and what the standard promises,
and doesn't promise.
> It seems that many rendering engines give to the sequence space,
> combining mark the width normally assigned to a space. Is this
> actually what the standard suggests?
The standard doesn't say anything about width in this case. It leaves
it up to the display engine, which is as it should be.
> I have identified a need to display combining marks with no extra
> width, only the width required by the mark. Should the sequence space,
> combining mark do what I want, or shouldn't it? If so, this needs to
> be spelled out so that rendering engines know what they are supposed
> to do. If not, there may be a need for a new character. This is a
> deficiency in the standard, not in the rendering engines.
When the specific alignment of isolated glyphs is important to me, I use
markup. I'm a big supporter of plain text, as many members of this list
know, but the exact spacing of isolated combining marks seems like a
layout issue to me.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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