Andrew Cunningham wrote:
> >And judging from Marco's unrelated post about Yoruba
> q-tilde, in which I
> >*did* see the tilde positioned correctly (more or less) over the q, I
> >guess support is more advanced than I thought. Terrific.
>
> Ummm ... may work for lower case ... if you're not fussy about precise
> location of the diacritic , i suspect that the diacritic
> would overstrike the uppercase character though.
It depends on the quality of the display engine and fonts. With technologies
such as OpenType, Graphite, ATSUI and others, accents are moved up or down
depending on the letter they apply to. Letters and accents define reference
points which must be matched when superimposing diacritics.
Also, depending on the type design, either the base letter, the diacritic or
both may have alternative ("contextual") glyphs. E.g., "i" and "j" loose
their dot when marked by an accent; an accent can have a vertically squeezed
variant when applied to capital or tall letters, and a horizontally squeezed
version when applied to narrow letter (such as "i" or "l"); capital letters
may have a smaller version to fit a diacritic on top, etc.
But if the font is old technology (e.g. TrueType), you cannot be fussy about
precise location of the diacritic, in fact. In these kinds of fonts,
diacritics are generally missing or, at best, designed to fit the capitals,
so that they look ridiculously distant when used on lowercase.
_ Marco
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