From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Mon Jun 19 2006 - 16:02:27 CDT
On Saturday 17 June 2006 23:28, John Hudson wrote:
>
> The use of adscript iota with uppercase letters certainly precedes
> the 19th and 20th century. I have seen examples from the 16th
> century. Yes, these were in editions published outside of Greece, but
> as Konstantine Staikos has documented, emigre Greeks were heavily
> involved in that publishing.
Well, I agree that the tradition to put adscript iota after
capital letters may have existed long before the 19th century. I just
insist that the opposite practice is also perfectly legal (at least
in some types of editions) and may well correspond to the requirements
of fine Greek typography.
> The <ccmp> feature can be used to decompose individual glyphs into
> multiple glyphs. Decomposing digraphs is one of the uses for it.
Unfortunately, <ccmp> is not exactly that I want, because this tag
is normally used to describe very basical shaping behavior rather
that just typographic peculiarities. So disabling it would probably
be a bad idea (even if the application allows to do that). Thus I
can't use <ccmp> for those situations where I want to allow users
to access default glyph images mapped to specific slots by turning
any such "decompositions" defined for those slots off.
I also think that the desired type of glyph replacement cannot be
called "decomposition" in the strict sense. Suppose I would like
<U+1F08, U+03B9> to be substituted instead of <U+1F88>: this
substitution would be absolutely correct from the typographic point of
view, but surely will have nothing to do with the canonical
decomposition for <U+1F88>, which is <U+1F08, U+0345>. So I am not sure
if using <ccmp> for this purpose would be really correct.
> However, note that not all digraphs should necessarily be spaced out
> when overall spacing is increased: the Dutch IJ digraph is often seen
> spaced like e.g. R IJ N -- even in inscriptions carved in stone,
> where font or application limitations certainly were not to blame.
Well, even if some Latin digraphs don't require to be spaced out, all
Greek combinations with iota adscript surely do.
-- Regards, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru> Moscow State University Historical Faculty
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jun 19 2006 - 16:17:01 CDT