On Monday, February 18, 2002, at 10:52 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:
>
> In the '90s, when UTC and WG2 were more open to encoding precomposed
> forms, this approach was not too problematic, since any legitimate
> diacriticized character in an alphabetic script probably had its own
> precomposed form. Today, because of normalization considerations, we are
> probably not going to see any more precomposed characters that can already
> be formed with combining sequences. So if some language turns out to need
> "a with horn" in the future, its readers will have to cross its fingers
> that rendering engines become capable of displaying U+0061 U+031B
> properly.
>
This is actually a font issue, as well as a rendering engine issue.
Technologies like OpenType and Graphite allow the specification of
attachment points for accents, so that unanticipated forms can be drawn.
Of course, the rendering engine has to know enough to take advantage of
that, too.
I have on my docket drafting a UTR on the subject with a list of
precomposed glyphs which would be desirable in fonts and available to end
users.
==========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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