Re: Coloured diacritics (Was: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup)

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Sat Dec 06 2003 - 22:52:05 EST

  • Next message: Mark E. Shoulson: "Re: Glottal stops (bis) (was RE: Missing African Latin letters (bis))"

    I wrote:

    >The way to do this is to decompose bases and marks at the glyph level if
    >they are not already decomposed at the character level...

    I meant to say *one* way to do this...

    I didn't mean to imply that it was the only way, or necessarily the best
    way. It would be interesting and useful to see if this kind of thing can be
    reliably achieved based on character level distinctions between bases and
    marks, but you would still need to decompose precomposed base+mark
    diacritic glyphs. This could conceivably be done at the character level
    too, using Unicode canonical decompositions. You would also need to be able
    to deal with 'diacritic ligatures', i.e. mark glyphs that represent more
    than one mark character such as our old friend the Hebrew hataf vowel with
    medial meteg. If you encounter any characters *without* canonical combining
    classes and wanted to colour individual portions of them, then you still
    need to be able to decompose and identify the component glyphs, so a
    character-level approach will not get you 100% results. This takes us back
    to the unresolved bichromatic Ethiopic question of many months ago.

    John Hudson

    Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

    Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully
    by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play.
    There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully ... that the
    very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer
                 - Lentricchia & Mclaughlin, _Critical terms for literary study_



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Dec 06 2003 - 23:38:03 EST