From: John Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 10:39:27 EST
On Dec 16, 2003, at 4:27 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 11:03 +0100 2003-12-16, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>> Doug Ewell <dewell@adelphia.net> writes:
>>> > Wrong here: I have found occurences of dotless lowercase i, used
>>> > instead of soft-dotted lowercase i, as base letters for diacritics
>>> > added above it (it was an accute accent...)
>>>
>>> Don't do that.
>>
>> What? This is VALID UNICODE to have texts coded like this.
>
> In Irish, it is INCORRECT to spell "físeán" 'video' with a DOTLESS I +
> COMBINING ACUTE. It is a spelling error, and will fail in
> spell-checking. The correct spelling is either I + COMBINING ACUTE or
> precomposed I WITH ACUTE.
>
Michael is, of course, correct. The problem here is that in books on
Latin typography from the not too distant past, such as those by Robin
Williams (the other one), recommend using dotless-i + accent for
precisely this reason that the dot would otherwise collide with the
accent. Ms Williams was working in an environment, however, where all
kinds of hacks were needed for non-international software like Quark to
do the fancy stuff typographers wanted to do. A lot of the old
typography tricks are being obsoleted by Unicode,
OpenType/AAT/Graphite, and should no longer be adhered to.
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
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