...I will say again as I have said before - but the above (and what I snipped) is extra evidence for it - that what is broke (in the old or dialect sense "broken" rather than the modern sense "without money") is the rule that the isolated (generally spacing) form of a combining mark should be formed by SPACE or NBSP followed by the combining mark. There are many good reasons for not using SPACE for this, including default behaviour like inserting line breaks immediately after SPACE. The good additional reason James has given is that SPACE followed by the combining mark is often a mistake (and so it is sensible to add the dotted circle), but there is a need in certain kinds of texts to display isolated combining marks.
People generating texts for educational purposes will always have special needs. So, they'll always need to make special effort to get special effects. Workarounds concerning the original question have already been suggested.
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'?
Best regards,
James Kass
Using NBSP rather than SPACE has several advantages, and has long been specified in Unicode, although not widely implemented. It is less likely to occur accidentally. But it has disadvantages, especially that it will always be a spacing character, whereas for display of isolated Indic vowels no extra spacing is required.
I would like to repeat my earlier proposal for a new character ISOLATED COMBINING MARK BASE. This character would have no glyph, and the general properties of a letter. Its spacing would be just as much as required for proper display of the combining mark - which would be zero for combining marks which have their own width.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
