It's interesting that you're getting a better display in IE8 than I am. I'm running IE8 version 8.0.7600.16385 on the 64-bit Windows 7 with all the updates installed and I'm not seeing those characters combine.
I had not previously seen the 'invisible letter' proposal until Michael Everson kindly forwarded it to me. That is pretty much what I'm looking for with one caveat: if you need to be able to see the difference between sets like 059C and 059D, a visible letter (like the dotted circle) rather than an invisible one makes more sense. But perhaps that difference could be handled at the font level. I see the documentation in the minutes (http://unicode.org/consortium/utc-minutes/UTC-101-200411.html) where this proposal was rejected (by Microsoft, Apple, IBM, HP, Adobe and RLG) but I cannot find any discussion of why it was rejected. Without knowing why it was shot down, it is hard to write a better proposal to get this discussion going again. Is that information available anywhere? Maybe Asmus Freytag knows, since he was tasked to "Oppose the encoding of invisible letter at WG2 meetings"? ________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of CE Whitehead [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 4:30 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Generic Base Letter Hi. I am not objecting to the 'invisible letter' proposal at: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2822.pdf It seems sound. However the dotted circle seems to be the convention. Also the dotted circle 25CC seems to be working for me in IE8: when I displayed Vincent Setterholm's html code in my IE8 browser, the combining marks 05B8 and 05BC did combine appropriately with 25CC. But Vincent is right -- the combining mark characters in his email do not combine with 25CC only with each other, but there are no extra circles for the email in my browser! (I have only the one browser too for the moment.) As for documenting the use of the dotted circle 25CC, perhaps a change should be made to the note about it, saying that nevertheless (in spite of its size) this character can be used in combination with diacritics/combining marks. This would be done at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U25A0.pdf Would this be possible? (I personally do not see why both a dotted circle and an invisible character could not be used to display with combining marks. Which one should be used in a particular case would depend on stylistic preferences. Whether or not the current dotted circle's size is o.k., I have no opinion. Hope this is helpful.) Best, -- C. E. Whitehead [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
