Hi James, All, > If this is treated as a Unicode issue rather than a display issue, then > one solution > would be for someone to propose a new character, (back on topic a little > bit) > COMBINING DOTTED CIRCLE FOR COMBINING MARKS. > Then, rather than inserting DOTTED CIRCLE into the display, a rendering > engine > could be changed to insert this new character. Then, these updated > rendering > engines could be distributed and font developers could add the new > characters > to fonts and distribute updated fonts. This might just take a while, but > it > wouldn't be too hard to find examples of the character in actual text use > to > accompany the proposal... > > "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." So, is it 'broke'?
Your argument about not spotting errors, when SPACE+COMBINING SOMETHING gets rendered without the dotted circle looks convincing, but lacks consistency: The SPACE character can be used to transform the combining marks from the U+0300..U+03BF range into spacing characters. But that aside, it would be better to not to use SPACE for this purpose, for reasons you mentioned. So just any Unicode codepoint sequence which turns combining marks into spacing glyphs would be a solution (only the first answers to Srivas' question inidicated, that SPACE is to be used according to Unicode). One may be able to conjure a new Unicode codepoint ISOLATED COMBINING MARK for this purpose, but amongst all spaces and dubious characters at U+20?? something existing should be found adequate. Regards, Peter Jacobi -- +++ NEU bei GMX und erstmalig in Deutschland: TÜV-geprüfter Virenschutz +++ 100% Virenerkennung nach Wildlist. Infos: http://www.gmx.net/virenschutz
