Hi Mark, All,Yes, I agree. The discussion had moved farther afield, though, to the general case of styling combining sequences, so I was exploring other combining sequences that are or could be pathological.
I also agree, but I point out that the sufficiently perverse could come up with some pretty tough examples. Applying color is a pretty benign style, but what if I wanted a boldface circumflex on a normal letter? Or even more obnoxious, a 10-point circumflex on a an 8-point letter? These could be tricky to compute.
Please have a look at the examples. This isn't a parallel to
accents. The Tamil vowels and consonants in questions are
clearly distinct side by side. They could have been styled using
a mechanical typewriter by double-striking, underlining or switching to the second color. Individually.
No, but changing font size between a letter and a diacritic is.if you ask the system to do bizarre things, it's your own fault (while applying color is not quite so bizarre).
Emphasizing a single letter isn't bizarre. It is often used in educational material.
(and now I contradict myself with a counterexample. In http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/biblical-hebrew94.pdf, Yannis Haralambous notes--correctly--that when typesetting the Hebrew Bible, letters that are written small hang from the top line and have normal-sized vowels below them (and the vowels are below the baseline of the normal text))
~mark
