CHAT: Unicode font rendering (was: Reformed ...)

"Daniel A. Wier" wrote:

> Microsoft uses these precomposed characters, most allocated to Latin
> Extended Additional (in Unicode); while it requires many more
> characters, it looks cleaner, since combining marks might not get placed
> exactly correctly, and two combining marks (required for Vietnamese)
> would just run over each other, and then you have a convoluted mess.
The use of combining characters in *representation* does not preclude
the use of high-quality (OpenType and the like) fonts.  There are
three plausible ways to render the sequence LATIN SMALL LETTER O followed
by COMBINING ACUTE:

        0) as "o´" (not plausible, just fallback);

        1) by superimposing a generic "´" on a generic "o", which may
        cause the base and the diacritic to be too close or too far apart;

        2) by finding and using a precomposed "ó" glyph in the font;

        3) by finding and using the correct language-specific "ó" glyph
        (the one for Polish should look a bit different from the one
        for Spanish, with the accent closer to its base).

You seem to think that #1 is the only option, and that to achieve #2
(still less #3), one must use the LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH ACUTE
character.  But the Unicode standard defines this character as exactly
equivalent to the two-character sequence, and genuinely Unicode-aware
font display libraries will treat the two exactly alike.

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