Re: Fwd: Re: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 12/07/03 08:55, Peter Jacobi wrote:

Hi Mark, All,

 

I also agree, but I point out that the sufficiently perverse could come 
up with some pretty tough examples.  Applying color is a pretty benign 
style, but what if I wanted a boldface circumflex on a normal letter?  
Or even more obnoxious, a 10-point circumflex on a an 8-point letter?  
These could be tricky to compute.
   

Please have a look at the examples. This isn't a parallel to
accents. The Tamil vowels and consonants in questions are
clearly distinct side by side. They could have been styled using
a mechanical typewriter by double-striking, underlining or 
switching to the second color. Individually.

Yes, I agree.  The discussion had moved farther afield, though, to the 
general case of styling combining sequences, so I was exploring other 
combining sequences that are or could be pathological.

if you ask the system to do bizarre things, it's your own fault (while 
applying color is not quite so bizarre).
   

Emphasizing a single letter isn't bizarre. It is often used in educational
material.
No, but changing font size between a letter and a diacritic is.

(and now I contradict myself with a counterexample.  In 
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/biblical-hebrew94.pdf, Yannis 
Haralambous notes--correctly--that when typesetting the Hebrew Bible, 
letters that are written small hang from the top line and have 
normal-sized vowels below them (and the vowels are below the baseline of 
the normal text))

~mark