Kenneth Whistler <kenw at sybase dot com> wrote: > Long ago > it was decided that it would not be a good idea to extend > formal character decomposition to such base letterform shape > changes or bars across letters. (Note that Latin characters > with bars: barred-b, barred-d, barred-i, barred-u, barred-l, > and the like are also not decomposed formally. Similarly for > Latin letters with hooks, and so on.) > > So formal canonical decompositions are almost entirely > confined to separable, accent-like diacritics (acute, > grave, diaeresis, and so on). The only significant exceptions are > the cedilla and ogonek, which attach smoothly to letter > bottoms without otherwise distorting them, and which > often have graphic alternates that are, indeed, separated > diacritics (comma-like and reverse-comma-like forms).
I always wondered why the with-acute and with-circumflex letters were decomposable but something like U+0141 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH STROKE was not. After all, Unicode has combining "overstruck diacritics" like U+0337 COMBINING SHORT SOLIDUS OVERLAY; isn't that what one would use to compose an L-stroke? Same for the Maltese and Sami letters that use a horizontal stroke instead of a diagonal. It always seemed kind of random to me. Ken's reply explains why Cyrillic descenders and the like, which distort or deform the base character in some way, are not decomposable, and I can buy that, but I still don't see why stroke overlays are lumped in with that group. They don't distort the base form any more than cedillas and ogoneks do -- and isn't this a glyph issue anyway? Of course, the important thing is that they are NOT decomposable, for whatever historical reason, and won't be in the future. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
