At 16:34 10/29/2002, John Cowan wrote:
I'm generally in agreement with John about using generic combining marks when possible. From a font development perspective this can sometimes create problems in multilingual fonts, though, since the desired size of the mark might vary between scripts. For example, in the Latin script, the combining dot below is generally close in size to the dot above the lowercase i and slightly heavier than the two dots used in the diaeresis; in the Hebrew script, however, the combining dot below probably should be the same size as the holam and shin/sin dots above the letters, typically much smaller than the Latin form. Now, this is not necessarily a strong reason for separately encoding a Hebrew combining dot below, but is perhaps something for the UTC to consider in looking at Elaine's proposal. There is a mechanism within OpenType, for example, that would allow a specific variant of U+0323 to be automatically substituted as part of Hebrew shaping, using the Localised Forms <locl> layout feature and Hebrew-specific Language System tags. Support for this aspect of OpenType is being developed by Microsoft, but is not available yet.HEBREW MARK LOWER DOT: not needed, use generic U+0323 COMBINING DOT BELOW
As above, my guess is that this should correspond in size and design to the two dots of the Hebrew hiriq, which it likely to be smaller than the Latin diaeresis. Again, this is something that *can* be handled in glyph processing, but the UTC should consider whether they want to make this a requirement.diaeresis, lacks a name: not needed, use generic U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS
Again, I offer these comments only as they might be useful to the people who have to make the decision. Personally, I think existing and imminent font mechanisms are most likely sufficient to resolve any display problems at the glyph level, so the generic combining mark characters should probably be used.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
to make them available to us, either by argument
or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
