Re: Question about "do"

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 10:48:04AM -0500, Carlos Thompson wrote:
> > I always like coming across things written in Spanish where instead of
> > having a tilde on the |eñe|, they have a rising accent just like on the
> > vowels.
>
> Do you mean something like {ń}.
Note that folks without Unicode support won't see that character, whereas the
ñ character only requires the much more common Latin-1 character set.

On computers, you can't - in general - just type a letter, hit backspace,
then hit ['], and get an accented version of the letter.  Many software
input methods let you do that, but the result still has to be encoded
somehow.  Unicode lets you stick a U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT after
any character you want, but Unicode support in general is not that
widespread, and support for combining characters is only found in a small
subset of the environments which have any Unicode support at all.

The Latin-1 character set includes the common combinations from
Western European languages as single characters, so for maximal
compatibility even Unicode implementations tend to choose these in
favor of the combining form - for instance, encoding [ñ] as U+00F1
LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE rather than U+006E LATIN SMALL LETTER
N followed by U+0303 COMBINING TILDE.  The character ń is also
available as a precombined character - due to Polish, I believe -
but it's not in Latin-1: it's U+0144 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH ACUTE.
(Latin-1 characters are all U+00xx).

-Mark

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