Re: Acute accents over non-vowels

On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 06:49:07PM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> If I guess correctly, you have just given me the Unicode numbers for upper
> and lower case eng.
Yup.  If you're looking for specific characters in Unicode and you
know the names, then I recommend going to
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt and doing a "find".
I have a cached copy of that file that I do a quick search on whenever
I need to know the code point of a character.  It does require that
you know the name, though.  Haven't found a good way to say
"show me the character that looks like this". :)

> I've considered using eng, and would prefer it to a
> digraph in many ways (mainly because I don't like the idea of putting an
> accent over one half of a digraph).   But I haven't been certain how it
> would look or how many hassels it would cause.  Do the engs exist in
> accented versions or would I have to try to position an accent over them?
The engs don't exist precomposed with any diacritical marks
in the Unicode standard.  Theoretically, Unicode doesn't need
any precomposed symbols; all of them can be reproduced with the
combining marks.  The precomposed characters in there because they
were in the national character sets that Unicode incorporated.
And while the eng is used in Sami, it does not appear with any
diacriticals, so there were no precomposed characters to adopt.

All of which is just one more reason why it'd be nice to have a fully
Unicode compliant word processing system that could deal with the
combining marks.  The enyes also don't exist precomposed with
extra diacriticals, although the letter N does come precomposed with
a relatively wide variety of marks: tilde, acute and grave accents,
cedilla, caron, hook, and overdot.


> What's a good first choice for a Unicode font containing the accented
> sonorant consonants, eng, and [E] and [O], all in upper and lower case?
Most modern Windows fonts have good coverage of all of the Latin glyphs,
including the wonky diacritical marks.  Lucida Sans Unicode is historically
the most complete (despite the somewhat misleading name, it comes with
Unicode, not without. ;-)), but it is of course a sans-serif font.  If you want
serifs, Times New Roman has a pretty complete set of glyphs these days.
However, you may need to upgrade to Windows NT, 2000, or XP to take
full advantage of the Unicode characters in these fonts.

For email purposes I recommend a fixed-width font, and the one I use
is Everson Mono Terminal, which has full glyph coverage of all alphabetic
and syllabic scripts, missing only the Han characters.

-Mark