Re: Using combining diacritical marks and non-zero joiners in a name

From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Fri Apr 04 2008 - 03:03:21 CST

  • Next message: Adam Twardoch: "Re: Using combining diacritical marks and non-zero joiners in a name"

    Hello Andreas Prilop,

    you have written:
    > From a *practical* point of view, combining diacritical marks
    > don't yet work well in current programs - at least for the
    > Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts. Test your browser(s) here:
    > http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/combining-marks.html

    In this case, it’s a matter of fonts rather than programs.
    Try several fonts, including TITUS Cyberbit Basic
    <http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/unicode/tituut.asp>,
    and some of the SIL fonts
    <http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=FontDownloads
    to see various degrees of standards compliance.

    > Whenever a precomposed letter exists, use that one.

    This is still a good advice for HTML authors. However, the reader
    will sometimes see the precomposed letter from a different font
    than the surrounding text (if the character is not available in the
    current font, some browsers will try a different font for that very
    character).

    > But even "normal" Latin-1 characters in the header (Subject)
    > will lead ultimately to results like this:
    ...
    > http://groups.google.com/group/de.etc.sprache.deutsch/msg/54d3f0681c184959

    This is clearly a bug in the Google Groups software.

    > Use only ASCII characters in the Subject.

    I’d rather say: Use standard-complying e-mail software,
    e. g. Imp <http://www.horde.org/imp/>.

    > For a surprise, view
    > http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/temp/messy.html
    > with Internet Explorer 6 (six).

    What sort of surprise do you mean?

    Again, the outcome depends on the font used (tested with IE 6 SP2).
    To mention only a few:
    - Times New Roman, Verdana, and the various Lucidas,
       have rectangles (missing-character glyphs), rather than ties;
    - Palatino Linotype, and Sylfaen, have invisible glyphs,
       rather than ties;
    - Tahoma displays ties, but not properly placed;
    - TITUS Cyberbit Basic displays most of the ties alright,
       only on “iz”, “jz”, “lz”, and “mz” the ties are not properly placed;
    - Gentium (from SIL) does an even better job than TITUS Cyberbit Basic;
    - all fonts tested have no special glyphs for uppercase base characters.

    Best wishes,
       Otto Stolz

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