Re: Vallian (was: How to minimize "words")

On 2/24/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
> Of course there are writing systems (such as Vietnamese and perhaps some
> phone{t.m}ic transcriptions) that need more than one accent per character
*nods* and Unicode also caters for that -- as best I remember, it has
different "weights" for various kinds of diacritics specifying which
ones should be closer to the base character, so diacritics should
stack in the correct order regardless of which order you encode them
in (e.g. a + combining diaeresis + combining tilde should "do the
right thing", at least according to Unicode, though I don't remember
which order they think is the correct one in this case -- combinations
of letter + diacritic above + diacritic below or vice versa should
definitely work fine, though, if your rendering engine's up to it).

(Though the Vietnamese preference for tone markes such as acute and
grave to be next to vowel quality modifiers such as a circumflex are,
I believe, not specifically catered for; but in any event, such
language-specific behaviour is typically relegated to rendering
engines which are more aware of such things, rather than something
Unicode -- which is intended for all languages -- specifies. Similar
to how glyph shapes are not mandated, e.g. whether to display
d-with-caron as d-with-caron or (as preferred in Czech and Slovak
typography, I believe) as d-with-apostrophe.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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