About the design and encoding of diacritics involving cedillas and commaaccents:
[Note that remarks about language use are limited to a European context.] These glyphs are sometimes called /*cedilla/, but this is due to an historical misinterpretation in both the Unicode standard and the original version of the Adobe Glyph List: /Gcedilla/gcedilla/ /Kcedilla/kcedilla/ /Lcedilla/lcedilla/ /Ncedilla/ncedilla/ /Rcedilla/rcedilla/ These glyphs are used in a European context only for Latvian, and the correct form of diacritic is *not* a cedilla but the same unattached 'commaaccent' form used for Romanian S and T. [Note, however that you should not use the /comma/ glyph as a component below any of these letters: it is much too large. You want a shorter, typically curved form, occupying about the same height as the cedilla. The mark should be centred optically below the letter.] So these glyphs should actually be /Gcommaaccent/gcommaaccent/ /Kcommaaccent/kcommaaccent/ /Lcommaaccent/lcommaaccent/ /Ncommaaccent/ncommaaccent/ /Rcommaaccent/rcommaaccent/ but mapped to the ...WITH CEDILLA Unicode characters. NB: the lowercase /gcommaaccent/ is almost always written with a variant mark that actually sits above the letter (to avoid collision with the descending loop); this is achieved by rotating the commaaccent mark 180 degrees and positioning it above the g. I usually include the variant ingredient glyph /uni0312/ to use in the /gcommaaccent/ composite. Regarding the /Scedilla/ and /Tcedilla/ vs. /Scommaaccent/ and /Tcommaaccent/: /Scedilla/scedilla/ are used only for Turkish; this must be a true cedilla. /Scommaaccent/scommaaccent/ and /Tcommaaccent/tcommaaccent/ are used only for Romanian; this must be the same 'comma' diacritic form discussed above for Latvian, and should *not* be attached to the letter. /Tcedilla/tcedilla/ is not used for any European language (it is arguably more appropriate for Gagauz Turkish than the 'comma' accent form, because they also use the /Scedilla/, but GT texts I have seen all use the 'comma' below the T and the cedilla below the S). Generally I do not include the cedilla variant in fonts, and simply double map the /Tcommaaccent/ to the Unicode values discussed below. Version 3.0 of the Unicode standard, which postdates the published WGL4 set, disunified the /Scedilla/ and /Tcedilla/ from the /Scommaaccent/ and /Tcommaaccent/ by providing new codepoints for the latter. My recommendation is to use the new codepoints for /Scommaaccent/ but to double map the /Tcommaccent/ glyph to the new codepoints and also to the old /Tcedilla/ codepoint. Note that there are text encoding issues regarding Romanian, because the Romanian 8-bit codepages all use the old /Scedilla/ and /Tcedilla/ Unicode codepoints, not the new codepoints for the 'comma' accent characters. In OpenType fonts, we've addressed this (for future support) by including a Language System tag for Romanian, and a Localised Forms <locl> feature lookup to substitute the /Scommaccent/ glyph for the /Scedilla/. This feature is not yet supported in any systems or applications, but I'm reasonably certain that it will be. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED] Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton
