> So far so good, but when I get to an accent with no predefined spacing > variant, I have a problem!
No you don't. If you want to say <Seagull> is the diacritic used to represent linguolabial sounds in the IPA, then you just encode U+0020 U+033C at the beginning of the next line. If the seagull doesn't line up properly, you complain to the foundry or the implementor.
Again, you are working on the assumption that U+0020 is represented by an actual painted glyph and not e.g. by a horizontal offset. In my experience, the more sophisticated the application -- e.g. a professional page layout application rather than a word processor -- the more likely it is that white space characters will not be consistently treated as painted glyphs. I've heard convincing arguments from the engineeers of such applications that the space character shouldn't be a glyph in the font at all, but should simply be a numeric value telling applications how large an offset to apply. Since most fonts do not contain glyphs for variant white space characters such as thin and hair spaces, applications typically treat these as offset values. Painting a glyph is only one way to represent a character.
Regards, John
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
