Re: Tone Romanization: Opinions Sought

From: David Peterson <thatbluecat@...>
> Try as I might, I can't get my browser to display this.  In my Unicode
> charts, there's a section called "combining diacritical marks".  This
> seemed like an easy solution.
*nods* that's what I was talking about. I believe that's how it's
"supposed" to be done.

> Too easy, it would seem.  Whenever
> I enter the appropriate Unicode number the diacritic mark is displayed
> *next to* the character in question, and *not* on top of it!
As you've noted, though, the results you get in many applications
leave a bit to be desired. (Stacking multiple diacritics is even
harder.)

> With everything else, it's displayed as
> character + diacritic, side-by-side.  I've tried looking on all the browsers
> available to me (i.e., Safari, Netscape and Firefox).  Is it just because
> I have a Mac?
I don't know. It may be, since I think font rendering is usually
handled by the operating system, but some applications (such as
browsers) do their own rendering at least partly. (This causes
interesting effects such as Opera 6 on my Windows NT machine - it
renders Arabic text left-to-right and with isolated shapes on web
pages because Opera has no bidirectional capability, but one-line text
entry boxes show right-to-left, connected Arabic because it's the
operating system, not the browser, that renders the text there - and
NT *does* do bi-di!)

I'm not aware of any browser or other program that renders character +
diacritic "properly"; the most common appearance is probably with the
diacritic next to the letter. Which is at least slightly better than
over the following letter or replaced by a question mark or box. I
think some may also place them over the preceding letter as intended,
but badly kerned.

As I said, I think widely available technology doesn't yet "do"
combining diacritics well, so they're more of a theoretical
possibility than something that's useful in practice.

> [P.S.: When I hit "reply", this went straight to you.]
*nods* I use Gmail for the CONLANG list due to its ability to thread
messages into conversations, and Gmail automatically inserts a
"Reply-To" header directing replies back to me (which I consider
unnecessary, since the "From" header lists my address already). The
mailing list software also inserts a "Reply-To" header in messages
directing replies to the list *but only if there is no such header
present yet*. Hence, Gmail users break the normal reply-to-list
functionality. I apologise (and try to remember to include "Watch the
Reply-To!" or similar in my .sig). I'm not sure of a good solution,
though, since the volume is too big, and there usually are too many
simultaneous threads going on at the same time, for the other mailers
I use.

> [P.P.S.: Incidentally, thanks, Philip, for the detailed reply on my
> post that replaced the thorn with the Japanese character.  I tried
> emending my quotation method.  Is it sufficient?]
It's good enough for Gmail; it recognises the quotes as quotes and
displays them in the "quoted" colour since it recognises all of the
lines. And for those whose mailers don't do the same, the << >> serve
to delimite quotes. I think it's a decent enough solution. Thank you!

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton
pnewton@fastmail.fm