<sarcasm type="mild">
Okay, I can think of three solutions.
1. A rendering engine that snips off the dot prior to combining a
diacritical. Font manufacturers would have to keep their dots within
certain bounds, or risk LATIN SMALL LETTER J WITH HALF-DOT ABOVE or LATIN
SMALL LETTER LOWER LOOP OF J.
2. Users of languages that require accented j would make or commision fonts
with U+006A dotless (a "glyph variant"). When they wrote in, say, English,
they would combine it with U+0307 COMBINING DOT ABOVE, and hope that no one
would ever search or sort it.
3. Dotless j could go in the private use area, and all the users of
languages that required accented j could agree on where.
4. As long as they are using the private use area, they might as well
precompose all their j combinations. In fact, they could put their entire
alphabet there, pre-empt the Windows Symbol block, and use out-of-the-box
US Windows (as long as they didn't mind the rest of it not being
localized).
I hope I'm starting to see the logic of all this....
BTW, the "rendering engine" combo of Eudora Pro and my video driver cuts
the dots off j as I type, and I have to scroll or resize the window to see
them. I had always thought of this as a bug (it also cuts off the top loop
of f), but now I see that it's a feature.
</sarcasm>
----------------------------------------------------------------
Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University FAX: (909) 869-4078
Pomona CA 91768-4032 USA jcclark@csupomona.edu
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