Re: combining: half, double, triple et cetera ad infinitum

And arguably, I have also wanted this since long, instead of the hacks
introduced by the so called "double" diacritics and "half" diacritics
that break the character identity of those diacritics and also
introduce encoding ambiguities.

In fact, those things would have been encoded since long if Unicode
and ISO 10646 had extended their character model to cover a broader
range of "structured character clusters".

Two format characters (with combining class 0 for the purpose of
normalizations) would have been enough for most applications:
- U+xxx0 BEGIN EXTENDED CLUSTER (BEC)
- U+xxx1 END EXTENDED CLUSTER (EEC)
And then you would have encoded the standard diacritics after the
sequence enclosed by these characters, for example cartouches (using
an enclosing diacritic).

A third format control would have been used as well to specify that
two clusters (simple letters or letters with simple diacritics, and
including extended clusters) would stack vertically instead of
horizontally. With this third one, the basic structure would be
encodable really as plain-text.

Yes this would have not worked with today's OpenType specifications,
but this would have been the place for extending those specifications
and not something blocking the encoding process. i am still convinced
that this should not be part of an "upper-layer standard', which is
not interoperable, and complicates the integration of those
pseudo-encoded texts.

Once the structure is encoded as such, there is still the possibility
to create a linear graphical representation as a reasonnable readable
fallback exhibiting the structure unambiguously, even if the text
renderer cannot produce the 2D layout (you just need to make those
format controls visible by themselves with a glyph, or some other
meaning offered in the text renderer, including with colors or various
style effects).

2011/11/14 Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa_at_gmail.com>:
> That is not what he asked. He wants more than one base character to combine
> with a single combining mark.
Received on Mon Nov 14 2011 - 14:05:21 CST