From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun Nov 17 2002 - 19:26:31 EST
John Hudson <tiro at tiro dot com> wrote:
> The underdot (low glottalised tone), when applied to the lowercase y,
> should sit just slightly to the right of the descending stroke, far
> enough under the right side of the letter to make it clear that the
> dot is below and not to the side of the letter. Clearly, this would
> be impossible in designs that have a straight right side descending y
> (e.g. the Bremer Presse roman). I don't know what to suggest for such
> cases other than to avoid such designs when making typefaces for
> Vietnamese.
Well, I suppose it might work to put the dot to the *left* of such a
descender, as long as it's still clear that the dot is below and not to
the side of the letter. The real problem comes when you have a
script-like font where the looped tail chews up all the room and forces
the dot to be placed waaay down below the descender.
In Central European typography, when diacritics on lower-case letters
interfere with ascenders and descenders, you are sometimes permitted to
move the diacritic to a less intrusive location (cf. U+010F, U+0123).
I've never seen such a thing in Vietnamese, though, possibly because of
the danger of confusing one tone mark for another. Any of the five tone
marks may appear on any of the 12 vowels in Vietnamese (including breve,
circumflex, and horn varieties) and misreading a tone mark would be Very
Bad.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
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