Re: Acute accents over non-vowels

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 16:46:32 -0400, Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
wrote:

>Unfortunately, I do not yet know how to type *any* accented or unusual
>characters.  (Except that by serendipity I happened yesterday upon the html
>coding for the five vowels with acute or grave accents over them, but that
>doesn't do me any good in a word processor.)
On a Windows system you can install the United States-International
keyboard, which lets you type the accented characters in the Windows code
page by using dead keys (i.e., type the ' key and then the letter to get an
accented character). Unfortunately that doesn't include any consonants with
acute accents.

If you have a Windows 2000 or XP system, you can download Keyman 6.0 from
Tavultesoft (http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/), which is free for
personal use, and a Keyman keyboard for the Latin alphabet from my web site
(http://www.io.com/~hmiller/kmx/Latin.kmx). After installing and activating
the keyboard (see the Keyman instructions), you can add an acute accent to
any character by holding the right Alt key and pressing the ' key. Whether
or not it appears correctly in the document depends on the font you have
selected; not all fonts include all the precomposed accented characters. If
you type a combination that doesn't have a precomposed character, it'll use
the combining diacritic, which may not look right on most fonts, especially
with wide letters like "m". In theory, the technology should be able to
support glyph positioning tables that can put the accent mark in the right
place, but I haven't seen any software or fonts that will do this for Latin
scripts.

>  Another one of my conlangs is
>a tone language with two tones, without syllabic sonorant consonants, but
>possibly with lax vowels for which I will need non-Roman charaters (I could
>restrict the vowel system to the basic 5 so as not to have to use non-Roman
>characters,  but I would rather extend it slightly to include /E/ and
>/O/.)  In any case, the high tones will need to be marked with an acute
>accent.  What options do I have for methods to use to put in these
>accents?  How are these options restricted if I chose to represent /E/ and
>/O/ with something like the IPA symbols?  (Which brings up the question of
>where I could possibly get upper-case versions of the IPA symbols.)
Most of the IPA symbols don't have upper-case versions in Unicode, so you'd
have to use a font that includes them in the Private Use area, if there is
such a font. Fortunately, some of the upper-case IPA symbols (including
ones for /E/ and /O/) are in the Latin Extended-B range.

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