On 19 Jun 2013, at 13:41, Denis Jacquerye <[email protected]> wrote: >> The same way one would rationalize using precomposed ãẽĩñõũỹ (aeinouy with >> tilde) but a necessarily de-composed g̃ (g with tilde) in Guaraní. > > This is wrong: ãẽĩñõũỹ normalize to use U+0303 in NFD, so they > canonically use the same tilde as g̃.
Only in text which has been decomposed. Not all text gets decomposed. > The 4 additional non decomposable characters with Marshallese with cedilla > would not normalize to use the same cedilla as the others Marshallese > characters with cedilla. The would no canonically use the > same cedilla. That's correct. Why? Because the Latvians are using L+cedilla and N+cedilla, and we cannot change that. Mistakes were made in 1990 and 1991. We have to live with those mistakes. (Some mistakes we don't have t live with -- but this one we do.) >>> It would require less new characters to be encoded and would make it easier >>> to support in fonts (adding 1 instead of 4). >> >> No! Because if you added a single new character you'd have to make sure you >> had good glyph placement with LlMmNnOo which is eight glyphs. > > The best practice would require to add diacritical mark placement whenever > necessary if not on all possible base character, M/m and O/o would still need > either way, L/l and N/n would need it for other > combining diacritics either way. In my fonts I do this with pre-composed glyphs. I don't really know how easy or how reliable attachment points for floating diacritics is. > A modern font already needs to be able to correctly place combining > diacritics, including cedilla or ogonek. > Navajo and other languages need other placement of ogonek than that of > European languages. I'd like to see evidence for that assertion. When I was in Lithuania last week I saw many examples of badly-placed ogonek, particularly on capital letters. What is your assertion about Navajo? > This does not mean it is justified to encode single precomposed Navajo ogonek > characters. But that isn't the issue here. > The placement of the cedilla is not semantically different, m̧ with the > cedilla on the left has the same meaning as if the cedilla were centered or > on the right, even if just one of the two is correct in > some contexts like in Marshallese. That isn't the issue here. The issue is that Marshallese uses a cedilla shape, but that despite the decomposition, Latvian letters with cedilla are drawn with commas below. So Marshallese gets the wrong glyph for L+cedilla and N+cedilla. > This does not mean it is justified to encode m with left cedilla, m with > centered cedilla or m with right cedilla. > An additional single combining diacritics would behave the same way. This isn't about diacritic positioning. It's about glyph shape. >>> ALA-LC romanizations use cedilla with r as they do under c or s. >> >> Does ŗ contrast with r̦ in ALA-LC romanization? > > The same way Marshallese has cedilla letters contrasting with comma below > letters. > The only correct form is with cedilla and it doesn't use comma below. All right: where does ŗ contrast with r̦ in ALA-LC romanization? >> Do you think that encoding one new COMBINING MARSHALLESE CEDILLA will not >> cause problems both with existing COMBINING COMMA BELOW and COMBINING >> CEDILLA? > > About the confusability, it is too late. Comma below, cedilla, palatalized > hook below, ring half ring below and probably others are already confusable. > Adding another will increase confusability but not > to a relevant degree. But there's nothing wrong with the current representation of Marshallese M̧ m̧ or O̧ o̧. Those are fine. > Having 4 single characters will not make anything less confusable (using > U+0327 with M/m and O/o but not with L/l and N/n is confusing) That's a different kind of confusion. It might be counter-intuitive to use COMBINING CEDILLA with M/m and O/o and pre-composed characters with L/l and N/n, but > although it is a solution is does not solve the general problem of cedilla. We can't really "solve" the general problem. > If we don't want additional confusing characters maybe we should have CGJ, > ZWJ or ZWNJ + combining cedilla (or any other similar sequence) to optionally > differentiate the types of cedillas in Latvian, > Livonian, Marshallese and romanizations. We can't really use these with combining diacritical marks. > The issue of cedilla can easily be solved at a higher level, font > technologies like OpenType can easily display glyphs in Latvian or Livonia > and different glyphs for Marshallese. Only in environments which permit language tagging. I'd like Marshallese children to be able to write their language in filenames. Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
