precomposed polytonic Greek characters with macrons and other diacritics

The Greek Extended block includes precomposed characters for vowels with
all known combinations of accents, breathing and iota subscript. It also
includes precomposed characters for the vowels alpha, iota and upsilon with
macron. (Those three vowels are ambiguously short or long hence the need to
mark length in some contexts).

However, there is no precomposition of vowels with accents and/or breathing
PLUS macron. (Vowels with iota subscript are always long so don't need a
macron to indicate length).

This isn't normally an issue in running polytonic Greek text where vowel
length is rarely shown but is does occur in lexicons, grammars, etc.

I'm wondering what potential objections / problems I should be aware of
before trying to put together a proposal for these extra precomposed
characters to be included.

I wrote a blog post about this issue more broadly (not all of which has to
do with Unicode) but which still might be of interest:

http://jktauber.com/2016/01/28/polytonic-greek-unicode-is-still-not-perfect/

James
Received on Mon Feb 08 2016 - 11:18:00 CST