Are there any advantages to making composite glyphs as opposed to just copying the diacratic mark into the base glyph?
There are several advantages to using composites for the font designer.
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Using composites reduces the size of the font, because data is not duplicated.
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Most important from the designer’s point of view is that it makes much less work to redesign the font. For example, if your font includes áéíóú and you decide to redesign the acute accent to make it thicker or steeper, you only have to edit one glyph — the acute accent, not ten or more simple glyphs. Furthermore, it ensures that you don’t forget to edit one character and end up with two different designs by mistake, so it ensures that your design is consistent. The same principles hold true if you want to redesign the base vowels.
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By using the complete composites feature, or the Transform Scripts, you can insert hundreds of accented characters in a few seconds. That is much faster than copy and paste hundreds of times.
Oh, I didn’t know it automatically updates. Does the position also automatically update?
Try it and see.
It most certainly does 