How about:
shin < regular meteg < CGJ < hataf < dagesh < shindot
The CGJ prevents the reordering of the meteg around the hataf and dagesh, and the sequence <meteg, CGJ, hataf> gives the font a separate sequence to ligate, distinguishing it from <hataf, dagesh, meteg> above.
The meteg need to be to the left of, i.e. after, the hataf vowel:
shin < hataf < CGJ <meteg <dagesh <shindot
I can make this work, although it requires some fancy footwork in the font: I need to remove the CGJ in order not to confuse the mark positioning lookups, but do so without producing the same glyph string that results in the medial meteg ligatation with the hataf vowel. This can be done by including a second, unencoded meteg glyph in the font and substituting this for the regular meteg whenever preceded by CGJ, then the CGJ is removed and the new meteg positioned. [Not exactly tidy: since apps like InDesign started presenting glyph sets to the user, I'm less happy about including duplicate and potentially confusing glyphs.] In VOLT expressions:
#ccmp feature
#Second meteg lookup
meteg -> meteg.2
#in context:
CGJ | #Remove CGJ lookup
<Any glyph> CGJ -> <Any glyph>I *think* I can make pretty much any sequence involving CGJ work by removing the CGJ glyph as an appropriately early stage in glyph processing: it does its job in character ordering and then gets ditched in display, having triggered any glyph substitutions necessary for further processing. However, as noted before, this is entirely dependent on CGJ being treated as a painted combining mark and *not* as an unpainted control character. I'm still *very* nervous about this proposed solution if there is a chance that applications will not paint this character.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
