From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Nov 07 2008 - 02:06:38 CST
On 7 Nov 2008, at 02:41, Doug Ewell wrote:
> As some have already pointed out, there are letters used in
> Vietnamese that have diacritics positioned side-by-side, or at least
> "sort of" side-by-side. The precomposed forms of these letters
> decompose to the base letter, plus the first diacritic, plus the
> second diacritic. Of course, these decompositions are immutable.
And indeed, Vietnamese does not, therefore, have this problem, because
the pre-composed glyphs can be counted on to be used ti provide the
correct glyphs.
> I would consider it strange if a different application of the Latin
> script were to indicate the side-by-side rendering explicitly, by
> means of a special "combining mark joiner" control character, while
> Vietnamese text would not. It would be inconsistent and surprising,
> and it might make developers of fonts and rendering engines think
> the marks are not to be rendered side-by-side *unless* the control
> character is present, which would cause decomposed Vietnamese to be
> rendered in the non-preferred way.
There is no real problem, if you want to do it this way, providing
that there is no push-back when we propose pre-composed some side-by-
side diacritical marks. (We already have precedent for this in a few
UPA diacritical marks, so perhaps this will not be problematic.)
> I don't know how widespread Teuthonista is, but about 44 million
> people read Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese don't have a problem for the reason stated.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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