Unicode cognoscenti, The responses to Pim's question are all correct, of course. However, I would make a plea that when answering such questions, especially from people new to Unicode, a sentence should be added such as the following: "At the moment, operating systems don't support the display of combining marks in Latin/Greek/Cyrillic. We understand that this is frustrating for some users, but, for the reasons already explained, adding precomposed combinations is no longer possible." It seems almost arrogant to baldly tell someone that they need to use combining marks when they can't do it!
I do certainly understand that this situation is not the fault of the Unicode Consortium, and I do not mean to denigrate the work of anyone on this list--you are all white hats, doing great work in helping people use more writing systems in better ways. I don't think anybody meant to sound the wrong note, but (as someone who eagerly awaits OT support in Latin/Greek/Cyrillic) I think the replies did. In light of the above, Asmus' comments > However, it might be worthwhile to submit the gist of this > letter to the UTC with a request to document that the 'missing' > combinations are expected to occur, and to alert font vendors > intending to support classical Greek to make sure that their fonts > supply these glyphs. don't make a lot of sense. The combining marks needed are already encoded. What does this mean -- that font vendors should add glyphs to the PUA? This does not help to further the standard. What we need is support for combining marks so we can use what has been in Unicode for a very long time. I've read that support for combining marks in Latin is coming in Office, and I am assuming that this means Greek and Cyrillic also. If anyone can confirm that, you would make my day. David
