Re: Combining latin small letters with diacritics

[Asmus Freytag]

On 3/6/2012 1:57 AM, Karl Pentzlin wrote: Regarding e.g. the "combining œ with breve" as shown on p.24 9th line (see attached scan), this seems to be an "intermediate sound" "u + œ", to which the breve is applied as a whole (which means, not surprisingly, «voyelle brève» according to p.19). Thus, we have no "combining œ with breve" here, but simply the sequence: U+0075 LATIN SMALL LETTER U U+1DFx COMBINING LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE (not yet encoded) U+0306 COMBINING BREVE Karl, you have the advantage, of course of having the whole book in front of you, but at least the typographer has visually deconstructed the issue differently. The "breve" on the oe is not the same glyph at all from the breve on the i. Now, I daresay that this effect could be reproduced with clever font tables, but it doesn't change the fact that visually what you see is indistinguishable from placing an oe-breve on the u. If it's impossible to make a distinction (as reader) between a breve applied to a combining character as opposed to the entire cluster, then encoding the breve separately is of more limited utility - except, unless there are lots of other vowels with breve. However, if reproducing the appearance of your sample is what is intended, encoding a separate breve does complicate layout by requiring some fancy footwork with stacked accent placement. Usually, stacked accents do not get smaller, but generally just change position, so this would have to be an exception to general stacked accent layout. I wonder whether that kind of complication is worth it to model the writer's conception of the text, when modeling the visual (reader's) perception would be somewhat simpler and with higher chance of getting rendered correctly... A./ u-oe-breve-p24.png