Peter Kirk <peter dot r dot kirk at ntlworld dot com> wrote: > Point taken. But when different fonts and rendering engines give > different results because the standard is unclear or ambiguous, that > is a matter for the discussion here. And when conforming fonts and > rendering engines fail to give the required results, that may also be > because of a deficiency in the standard.
Or it may not. It may be a deficiency in the level of Unicode support afforded by the fonts and rendering engines. It may simply reflect a difference between your "requirements" and what the standard promises, and doesn't promise. > It seems that many rendering engines give to the sequence space, > combining mark the width normally assigned to a space. Is this > actually what the standard suggests? The standard doesn't say anything about width in this case. It leaves it up to the display engine, which is as it should be. > I have identified a need to display combining marks with no extra > width, only the width required by the mark. Should the sequence space, > combining mark do what I want, or shouldn't it? If so, this needs to > be spelled out so that rendering engines know what they are supposed > to do. If not, there may be a need for a new character. This is a > deficiency in the standard, not in the rendering engines. When the specific alignment of isolated glyphs is important to me, I use markup. I'm a big supporter of plain text, as many members of this list know, but the exact spacing of isolated combining marks seems like a layout issue to me. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
