Summary: Would it be possible to define the U+FE00 variant sequence for a with two dots above it to be a with an e above it, and similarly U+FE00 variant sequences for o with two dots above it and for u with two dots above it, and possibly for e with two dots above it as well?
I may not have got the details right about this suggestion, but, if the general idea is thought good, I am sure that one of the experts on this list could codify it properly. ---- It seems to me that there is middle ground between the two views being expressed. Suppose, for example, hypothetically, that there is a font available in Germany, named Volksmusik which is a display font intended for setting headings in modern German, such as for the headings in advertisements for restaurants and so on, and that in that font the a umlaut, o umlaut and u umlaut are all expressed using a mark which is something like a small letter e. Then, it seems to me that if a theatre restaurant manager has set out the text required for a menu for the restaurant for some special gala evening to be held soon using a plain text editor on a PC using a font such as Arial, with a umlaut characters appearing many times, sometimes in headings and sometimes in the main body of the text, then stored the text on a floppy disc and walked down the road to the print shop and explained to the print shop manager that here is the text content for the menus in Arial, could the print shop please supply 500 menus using that text content yet jazzing it up a bit so that the headings on each of the four pages is in a fancy typeface in a different colour, then it should be quite straightforward for the print shop manager to copy the text onto the clipboard from the Arial file, and paste it into some other file, then change the font for each of the page headings to the Volksmusik font, and make the font for the rest of the menu some plainer font. Thus, some a umlaut characters originally keyed by the restaurant manager would display on the final menu as a with two dots above and some a umlaut characters keyed by the restaurant manager would display on the final menu as a with a small letter e above. The restaurant manager is, however, studying part-time for a research degree at the local university. This involves producing essays about various aspects of the printing of German literature, including quoting passages from earlier times, taking care to distinguish clearly between a with two dots above it and a with an e above it, all within using a plain text file, so that there is maximum portability in sending copies of the essay to various people, including the project supervisor at the University and the editors of various learned journals. How is the a with an e above it set, bearing in mind that there is no precomposed a with an e accent above character in regular Unicode and also that it would be nice if the text could be searched for keywords using just the usual search methods? Would it be possible to define the U+FE00 variant sequence for a with two dots above it to be a with an e above it, and similarly U+FE00 variant sequences for o with two dots above it and for u with two dots above it, and possibly for e with two dots above it as well? I may not have got the details right about this suggestion, but, if the general idea is thought good, I am sure that one of the experts on this list could codify it properly. William Overington 30 October 2002
