From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2006 - 14:31:13 CDT
Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>>If I had to propose this for Unicode, I would propose a single "triple
>>diacritic" COMBINING TRIPLE BREVE BELOW, rather than precombined
>>lower-, title- and uppercase "sch with ligature tie" in rough analogy
>>to U+017A LATIN SMALL LETTER TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH.
>>Would this be the way to go?
> In my opinion, no. Once spanning mechanisms go beyond two
> base characters, it is no longer useful to try to treat
> them as encoded characters, as it is increasingly unlikely
> that appropriate rendering mechanisms will be available for
> them.
>
> An arbitrary-length spanning undertie or overtie is in
> principle more related to other mechanisms of highlighting
> arbitrary segments of text, such as underscoring,
> overscoring, and the like. I think the representation of
> such in digital text should be handled by style and
> markup, rather than by seeking solutions in character
> encoding.
My approach has been to handle such things at the font level using either ligatures, if
dealing with a known and discreet set of sequences for a particular language (e.g. ch with
underscore for Ethiopic transcription), or using contextually subsituted beginning, middle
and end glyphs for arbitrary sequences (e.g. overscores for Greek nomina sacra). In these
cases, I think it is certainly desirable to handle the underties or overties in charactar
encoding.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC john@tiro.ca I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. - Samuel Johnson
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