From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Dec 07 2003 - 05:40:27 EST
John Hudson writes:
> At 03:53 PM 12/6/2003, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
> >Still this is an interesting problem: some texts for example want to
> >exhibit some diacritics added to a base letter with a distinct color,
> >notably in linguistic texts related to grammar or orthography.
> >
> >So for example you could want to exhibit the difference between the two
> >French words "désert" and "dessert" by coloring the accent of the first
> >word or the second s of the second; or even more accurately between
> >"bailler" (concéder un bail, des baux) and "bâiller" (ouvrir en grand)
> >where the presence or absence of the circumflex on letter 'a' is
> >necessary to reflect the difference of both meaning and pronounciation.
>
> The way to do this is to decompose bases and marks at the glyph level if
> they are not already decomposed at the character level, and then
> to apply a colour to the mark.
You're saying exactly what I said and I included an example, read further
my message...
The only problem is to find a way not only to decompose characters (this is
easy), but to avoid creating defective grapheme clusters, whilst also
maintaining the graphical composition layout (i.e. glyph positioning).
Suppose that you wanted to color the middle vowel of a Hangul syllable
cluster, you would be in big troubles as decomposing syllables and
coloring jamos independantly would create separate strings that would
not be easy to position relatively as the middle vowel jamo has a
layout which depends on its surrounding consonnant jamos...
Without a specific support in the (non-Unicode) style engine, solutions
based on decompositions of characters may become tricky...
Just one example, suppose that you want to color the circumflex above
a lowercase i or above a uppercase A: the base letters have distinct
widths (meaning that the diacritic has a different horizontal position),
distinct height (meaning that the diacritic has a different vertical
position), and a distinct contextual effect on its base letter (the
base lowercase i should have its dot removed)...
So decomposition is not the way to go, and characters should still need
to be represented in a unbroken grapheme cluster, and the markup should
be able to specify style on part of the grapheme cluster... Again here
this is not a problem of Unicode itself.
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