Re: Questions about diacritics

[Philippe Verdy]

Good point, but is the ZWNJ control supposed to be used as a base character 
with a defined height? I thought it was just a control for indicating where 
ligatures are preferably to avoid when rendering, leaving it fully ignorable 
if the renderer has no other option than rendering the ligature. For this 
application, the following character was a base character.
Other uses of ZWNJ before diacritics are in Indic scripts, or in the Hebrew 
proposals (in Public Review for Meteg), to control the meaning of the 
following character.

So I do think that the LateX2e "compound word mark" should map to 
<ZWNJ,INVISIBLE LETTER> rather than just ZWNJ...
The "(-)burg" abbreviation as "(-)bËg" (with a non-spacing but non-combining 
breve) should then be encoded with the invisible letter, in combination with 
ZWNJ to make it non-spacing.)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "JÃÂrg Knappen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Philippe Verdy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 6:06 PM
Subject: Re: Questions about diacritics


In LaTeX2e with the Cork coding (for TeXnicians: \usepackage[T1]{fontenc})
there is a so-called >>compound word mark<<. It has the functions of
teh ZERO WIDTH NON JOINER in the UCS: It breaks ligatures, it can be used
to produce a final s in the middle of a word.
By design, it has zero width but x height. So it can be used to carry
accents to be placed in the middle between two characters.
My classic for this situation is the german -burg abbreviature often seen
in cartography: It is -bg. with breve between b and g. The abbreviature
-bg. without accent means -berg.
--J"org Knappen