On 2019-08-12 8:30 AM, Andrew West wrote:
This issue was discussed at WG2 in 2013 (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2013/13128-latvian-marshal-adhoc.pdf), when there was a recommendation to encode precomposed letters L and N with cedilla*with no decomposition*, but that solution does not seem to have been taken up by the UTC.
Group One dots their lowercase "i" letters with little flowers and Group Two dots theirs with little hearts. Group Two considers flowers unacceptable and Group One rejects hearts. Because of legacy character sets there's a precomposed character encoded called "LATIN LOWER CASE I WITH HEART", but it was misnamed and is normally drawn with a flower instead. Group Two tries to encode "LATIN LOWER CASE I" plus "COMBINING HEART" to get the thing to display properly. But because there's a decomposition involved, the font engine substitutes the glyph mapped to "LATIN LOWER CASE I WITH HEART" in the display for the string "LATIN LOWER CASE I" plus "COMBINING HEART". This thwarts Group Two because they still get the flower.
The solution is to deprecate "LATIN LOWER CASE I WITH HEART". It's only in there because of legacy. It's presence guarantees round-tripping with legacy data but it isn't needed for modern data or display. Urge Groups One and Two to encode their data with the desired combiner and educate font engine developers about the deprecation. As the rendering engines get updated, the system substitution of the wrongly named precomposed glyph will go away.
This presumes that the premise of user communities feeling strongly about the unacceptable aspect of the variants is valid. Since it has been reported and nothing seems to be happening, perhaps the casual users aren't terribly concerned. It's also possible that the various user communities have already set up their systems to handle things acceptably by installing appropriate fonts.
