Re: Umlaut and Tréma, was: Variation selectors and vowel marks

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Tue Jul 13 2004 - 14:25:47 CDT

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    Doug Ewell scripsit:

    > CGJ + COMBINING DIAERESIS is a hack, but then again the need to draw a
    > distinction between the exact same combining mark used for two different
    > phonetic purposes is a bit of a hack too.

    However, there used to be typographical distinctions in certain German
    fonts between umlaut and diaeresis: see the examples on p. 15 of Victor
    Gaultney's paper "Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text
    faces" at http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/ProbsOfDiacDesignLowRes.pdf
    (warning: 1.4M), particularly Figure 39.

    > The alternative proposed by DIN, creating a new COMBINING UMLAUT
    > character, would have caused *unprecedented and catastrophic*
    > equivalence and normalization problems.

    Indeed. 

    -- 
"Take two turkeys, one goose, four              John Cowan
cabbages, but no duck, and mix them             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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