Re: [wEr\ Ar\ ju: fr6m] ?

> Date:         Fri, 9 Nov 2001 22:32:38 -0500
> From: John Cowan <cowan@...>
>
> Lars Henrik Mathiesen scripsit:
> > What constraints on the order of combining characters do I have to
> > observe to make sure the ligature halves will mesh? (According to
> > the Unicode standard, that is --- I'm not expecting Word's font
> > engine to do anything beyond overprinting).
>
> The order of combining marks that appear in different parts of the
> letter space is unimportant: thus, A, acute, dot below is the same
> as A, dot below, acute.  However, A, acute, circumflex renders the
> acute nearer to the A than the circumflex, and so is different
> from A, circumflex, acute: inside-outward is the general rule
> for all combining character that can interact.
>
> The property called Canonical Combining Class is used to give a
> preferred ordering to cases like A, dot below, acute (this one
> is preferred).  All combining characters in the same area have the same
> combining class: all base characters, and combining characters that
> don't interact with others, have class 0.
Hmmm. That means that if I use the ligature halves to construct a tie
bar, it'll go pear-shaped if the first character has got other
combining diacritics in the same area as the ligature... or if the
characters have different heights, I guess.

> > I would be happy if there was a font freely available that covered
> > just the chars needed for IPA, in a unified design. Including the
> > 50-odd glyphs needed from ASCII, Latin-1, Extended-A/B, Superscript,
> > Arrows, Combining Half Marks, wherever, and having some ligaturing
> > info and extra glyphs, perhaps.
>
> Someone with a font editor could extract the Right Stuff from one of
> the freely reusable fonts like Code2000.
Well, Code2000 seems to be shareware...

But I just became aware that Herman Miller has actually made such a
font, Thryomanes, which also has the double inverted breve going the
right way. It's a 1MB download instead of 25MB for Arial Unicode.

And might be easier to convince Herman than MS to put in extra
ligatures and such.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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