Re: Punctuation character (inverted interrobang) proposed

From: Denis Jacquerye (moyogo@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Oct 20 2005 - 00:21:24 CST

  • Next message: Christopher Fynn: "Re: Punctuation character (inverted interrobang) proposed"

    On 10/20/05, Christopher Fynn <cfynn@gmx.net> wrote:
    > Denis Jacquerye wrote:
    >
    > > Don't we all have to convince font designers to include our glyphs?
    > > "Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs."
    >
    > Again not exactly - in a "smart" font you can include a mark attachment
    > point on all base glyphs and a mark to mark attachment point on
    > diacritic marks - then a lookup which will attach any of these diacritic
    > mark glyphs to the glyph for any base character (or to a preceding mark
    > glyph where there are multiple diacritics) at this point.

    There aren't that many "smart" fonts out there. We might not have to
    convince font designer to include glyphs, but we surely have to
    convice them to include mark anchors. I haven't even seen a few
    capable of placing anchors at the right place.

    > The interrobang glyph looks like a question mark and exclamation mark
    > printed over each other (overlapping) - which is quite different than a
    > combining mark which sits above or below a base character glyph. (For a
    > start there can be rendering problems when you overlap two outlines.)

    This doesn't seem to have been an issue for U+0334-U+0338. But you are
    right, neither question mark nor exclamation point exist in a
    combining character form.

    > While there are fonts which have lookups allowing you to combine the
    > glyph for _any_ diacritic in the font with the glyph for _any_ base
    > letter in the font, I've never seen a font which lets one arbitrarily
    > print the glyph for any character *on top of* one for any other just by
    > inserting a ZWJ between two characters. So I think you'd more or less
    > have to have a specific lookup for this particular combination. A lookup
    > which displayed this combination of characters using a specific
    > "inverted interrobang" glyph in the font.

    The inverted interrobang glyph could be a ligature of inverterted
    U+00BF + U+200D + U+00A1 or the other way around, it would just need
    to be defined in the font.
    But I don't know if this is the proper use of ZWJ.

    --
    Denis Moyogo Jacquerye --- http://home.sus.mcgill.ca/~moyogo
    


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