On 3/17/2017 10:27 AM, Julian Bradfield wrote:
If you're working in a situation where you don't have either markup control or the facility to use plain monospaced text, then just use normal breves and acutes. It's not clear to me that laying out aligned text (for which there are many other applications than scansion, e.g. interlinear translation) is something best achieved with combining characters!
I concur with Julian here. In fact, the very wiki article on scansion cited by Rebecca makes it clear that this is an interlinear type of annotation that in principle can use many *other* symbols, including x's (or multiplication signs), digits, circumflexes, and other symbols.
Furthermore, the application of the scansion marks is to *syllables* and not to individual letters, which further enhances the case for interlinear representation. The simplest implementation of that is precisely as done in that wiki: force the interlinear examples into a monospace font.
For simple transposing of an interlinear scansion into a single-line plain text representation, either combining breves and acutes (and circumflexes and graves, ...) can be used and/or spacing versions of breves (and circumflexes...) plus ordinary slashes and backslashes can be dropped into the syllabified text.
--Ken
