Re: Questions about diacritics

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Sep 13 2004 - 11:18:17 CDT

  • Next message: Andy Heninger: "TR29 Word Break awkwardness"

    From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
    > Surely the intention is for <INVISIBLE LETTER, combining acute> to be
    > equivalent (although it cannot be canonically equivalent) to spacing
    > acute, U+00B4? But then would this kind of ligature mechanism with ZWNJ
    > and U+00B4 be appropriate? I would think not.

    <INVISIBLE LETTER,combining acute> will not be canonically equivalent
    effectively, depite it should produce and behave like the spacing acute.

    As ZWJ is intended to indicate that there's effectively a ligature
    opportunity between two grapheme clusters, I don't see why one would not
    support <a,ZWJ,SPACING ACUTE> to kern the spacing acute on the right side of
    a. It won't create an accent *centered* above the letter, but it now allows
    the accent to move within the spacing area of the preceding letter.

    I accept the fact that this is just a ligature opportunity for renderers,
    with no different semantics than in absence of the joiner. But I wonder if
    the digraph with the centered accent above is not simply that: the accent is
    a notation that does not change the semantics of the surrounding two vowels,
    with no orthographic consideration.

    In that case, this is really a rendering feature, and using ZWJ could be
    appropriate here, notably because <IL,combining acute> will remain
    canonically distinct from U+00B4, which also has the wrong character
    properties (not a letter, this is a symbol and a word-breaker by itself...).
    Most uses of isolated diacritics however are mainly symbolic rather than
    orthographic. The IL however changes this, and becomes appropriate within
    the middle of words.



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Sep 13 2004 - 11:19:55 CDT