Jerome Hodges asked:
> I'm currently typesetting a book written in Jarai (var. Jrai, J'rai), a
> tribal language used in the highlands of Vietnam; besides using characters
> already accounted for in the Vietnamese script, the written Jarai language
> uses several characters that are, to my knowledge, unique to it (and a small
> group of other tribal languages from this area). Among these are a, e, i,
> u, and o accented with both a circumflex and a breve (circumflex under
> breve),
NFD ~ NFC
a-circumflex-breve: <0061, 0302, 0306> ~ <00E2, 0306>
e-circumflex-breve: <0065, 0302, 0306> ~ <00EA, 0306>
i-circumflex-breve: <0069, 0302, 0306> ~ <00EE, 0306>
o-circumflex-breve: <006F, 0302, 0306> ~ <00F4, 0306>
u-circumflex-breve: <0075, 0302, 0306> ~ <00FB, 0306>
> b with a stroke,
b-stroke: <0180> ~ <0180> id.
> breved, horned o, breved, horned u, and
> circumflexed, horned u
o-horn-breve: <006F, 031B, 0306> ~ <01A1, 0306>
u-horn-breve: <0075, 031B, 0306> ~ <01B0, 0306>
u-horn-circumflex: <0075, 031B, 0302> ~ <01B0, 0302>
> (all in both lower- and upper-case variants).
Substitute out the uppercase for the relevant base characters, and
you have it.
>
> I think that these characters fit the guidelines to be included in the
> Unicode standard,
Actually, not, since with the exception of the b-stroke, which is
already encoded, they would be introducing precomposed characters for
sequences that are already representable with the characters already
encoded. The normalization forms (shown above: NFD, for the canonical
decomposition, and NFC, for the canonical composition) would have to
stay unchanged, so you essentially buy nothing by asking for
new Latin precomposed character encodings.
> but, then again, I'm fairly new to the Unicode world, and
> could be horribly mistaken. Any advice, and most thoughts, would be
> greatly appreciated.
You might work with font vendors, to ensure that the glyphs that they
design work well for the combining character sequences listed above.
--Ken Whistler
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jerome Hodges
> NCSU
>
>
>
