From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 01:55:12 EDT
At 23:02 08/07/2003, Jony Rosenne wrote:
>I mean "see" in the literal sense. I see an orphaned Hiriq squeezed between
>the Lamed and the Mem.
I see an orphaned hiriq carefully positioned relative to the lamed and mem.
If it were simply a question of sitting a secondary vowel on the line where
the left sidebearing of the lamed hits the right sidebearing of the mem, I
wouldn't much mind what control character might be used in the sequence.
But I need to be able to position vowels in *glyph* processing lookups that
are blind to control characters, so the practical rendering issues are more
complicated that 'squeezed between' would suggest.
>Similarly for the other examples given, both Biblical and modern.
In no case are the secondary vowels simply 'squeezed between'; correct
rendering always requires mark positioning. Consider the example cited by
Peter Kirk from Exodus 20:4, 10th word, in which you have the sequence
<qamats, etnahta, patah> following tav. This is correctly rendered with the
sequence of three marks centered under the tav. Inserting imaginary
zero-width consonant stand-ins will break the rendering with all current
technologies. This doesn't mean that these technologies can't be updated,
but the rendering issues are not trivial.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
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