The way to do this is to decompose bases and marks at the glyph level if they are not already decomposed at the character level...
I meant to say *one* way to do this...
I didn't mean to imply that it was the only way, or necessarily the best way. It would be interesting and useful to see if this kind of thing can be reliably achieved based on character level distinctions between bases and marks, but you would still need to decompose precomposed base+mark diacritic glyphs. This could conceivably be done at the character level too, using Unicode canonical decompositions. You would also need to be able to deal with 'diacritic ligatures', i.e. mark glyphs that represent more than one mark character such as our old friend the Hebrew hataf vowel with medial meteg. If you encounter any characters *without* canonical combining classes and wanted to colour individual portions of them, then you still need to be able to decompose and identify the component glyphs, so a character-level approach will not get you 100% results. This takes us back to the unresolved bichromatic Ethiopic question of many months ago.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully
by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play.
There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully ... that the
very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer
- Lentricchia & Mclaughlin, _Critical terms for literary study_
