Normalized text in OS X?

[Michael Everson]

I just took TextEdit and typed option-n-o shift-option-m which should 
get me o-tilde + ogonek. Then I typed option-m-o shift-option-n which 
should get me o-ogonek + tilde. (Don't worry about the keystrokes, 
that's dependeng on the input driver.) Now I saw the glyphs on the 
screen, and they weren't identical; in the first, the ogonek wasn't 
quite touching the base character and in the second the tilde was 
marginally higher than in the first. This doesn't alarm me because 
it's dependent on glyph tables, and Lucida Grande didn't have the 
precomposed triple.

What does confuse me is that I then tried to search for the strings, 
and I found that the Find engine considered the two strings to be 
different. Should it?

(I also found that when I saved and closed the file and reopened it, 
the combining ogonek was stripped out, which I suppose must be a bug.)
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com