Re: Sequences of combining characters (from Romanization of Cyrillic and Byzantine legal codes)

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Sep 20 2002 - 17:44:46 EDT

  • Next message: Peter_Constable@sil.org: "Re: Sequences of combining characters (from Romanization of Cyrillic and Byzantine legal codes)"

    Charles Cox suggested:

    > Might there be a case for defining an invisible combining enclosing mark
    > (ICEM), which is otherwise identical to the enclosing circle? Then, if I've
    > understood the conventions correctly the sequence:
    > U+0074 U+034F U+0073 ICEM U+0311 U+0307 would give ts with a centrally
    > placed inverted breve and a centrally placed dot above the inverted breve.

    We have talked about that option. It has a certain elegance
    to it as well. But implementers are getting very leery of
    continuing to add invisible format control characters of
    various types into the mix. They often seem to introduce
    unanticipated problems for rendering systems.

    My current feeling is that while we have demonstrable cases of
    visibly ligated digraphs with dots above in print, it isn't clear
    that we have a significant data representation problem that
    *requires* the introduction of some new mechanism -- yet.
    This stuff *can* all be handled with appropriately designed
    ligations in fonts, so there are options for display:

    <U+0074, U+0361, U+0073, U+0307>

       ==>
       maps via ligation table to:

    {t-s-tie-ligature-with-dot-above} glyph

    even though the default rendering would be:

    {t-s-dot-tie-ligature} glyph

    --Ken



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