Combining diacritics (was Re: Marking tones in conlangs)

On Tue, Feb 7, 2006 at  2:30 PM, Roger Mills wrote:

> I tried using diacritics, but since two vowels aren't standard (r and ÿ
> y-umlaut) (and for a while I couldn't do unicode things like macron and
> breve), that didn't work. Apparently there's a way to get diacritics onto
> ANY letter, but I haven't figured that out :-(
Depending on your software's ability to render it (see also my other post about Opera
and Alan Wood's pages), a combining diacritic is exactly that in Unicode. Open
your favorite character map (the default in Windows is under (All)
Programs\Accessories\System Tools), and look for characters from about U+0300
onwards. Follow any character by the character for the diacritic you want, and
Bob's yer uncle. The easiest way to do it is to compose the combination in your
character map, and copy & paste it wherever it belongs (e.g. Word, Frontpage,
whatever). Once it's in your document, you can copy and paste it wherever you
want.

One other trick is to find some easily typeable character in your final program,
and use it as a kind of compose key. For instance, if your document would not
otherwise have | in it, type |a` (or something) where you want a-grave to
appear, and periodically do a find and replace from |a` to a-grave. You can
paste from character map into the "Replace With" field by clicking in it and
using Ctrl-V to paste.





Paul

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