Creating diacritical marks at different vertical positions?

barry79 · Post by **barry79** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 4:46 pm

Hi,

I was wondering if it is possible to create combinations where the diacritical marks can appear at different vertical positions, depending on the letter involved?

For example, in Gealic fonts, a dot is sometimes placed above the letters -

B C D F G M P S T

and their small versions -

b c d f g m p s t.

The vertical possition of the dot depends on whether the letter being marked is a capital or a small.

You can see this with the following font -

http://www.fainne.org/gaelchlo/bun.html.

I'm guessing it should be possible, otherwise you could not combine an accute with a small letter "a" and a capital "A". At the same time, I'm wondering what will happen with a small letter i.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 9:46 pm

You added a full-stiop in the address

Take a look at any standard Windows font. You will see that caps and lowercase use the same diacritic positioned differently to suit the base character. The lowercase i accented characters must use dotless ı (dec 305) instead of regular i.

Gaelic seems to use a few characters not found (by me) in the Unicode code pages. Most are in Latin Extended Additional.

barry79 · Post by **barry79** » Fri Nov 05, 2004 8:30 pm

Hi again.

Using MsWord I had a look at the Times Roman font. The small letter "a" with acute (á) can be generated with unicode U+00C1. But if I type the letter "a" and then choose insert>>symbol via Word's menu bar, and add a diacritical mark, I get an "a" with an acute placed very high above it. This is not what I want. I want the character gererated by a+diacritical to be exactly equal to the "á" character. As far as I can see, the diacritical mark does not respond differently depending on the letter it is applied to. Can I get it to respond differently depending on the height of the letter in question? For example the acute over "Á" is higher than the acute over "á". Another issue with Times Roman is that when I added a diacritical mark over "A" it was slightly to the right of the letter.

In gaelic, there are two types of diacritical markings. Acutes and Dots. The position of the acute or dot depends on whether the letter is a capital or small.

There are two other unusual letters found in gaelic - long r (U+027c) and long s (U+017F). "i" is dotless in Gaelic anyway, but is still found in the regular i unicode position. Example -

http://www.fainne.org/gaelchlo/bun.html

Thanks for your help,

Barra.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Sat Nov 06, 2004 6:07 am

I don't have Word, but this is what I get in Wordpad, and it seems to be the same with any font. I entered characters from the Numeric keypad, which is what the numbers refer to.

I think it is best to design the Gaelic font so that you have the composite characters with diacritics, then you can type them with a single keystroke instead of two. Why would you want to do it the hard way? Also better for spellchecking or search and replace.

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Sat Nov 06, 2004 6:15 am

I think I'm confused as to what you are looking for.

In your first post, you discussed

if I type the letter "a" and then choose insert>>symbol via Word's menu bar, and add a diacritical mark, I get an "a" with an acute placed very high above it.

I did that and got an a´ which is really an a and a ´ -- not a single character but two characters. On the other hand if I select the á character from the same symbol font I would get the á (or type Alt+0225, or use U+00E1).

In your second post, you asked

if it is possible to create combinations where the diacritical marks can appear at different vertical positions, depending on the letter involved,

With FCP it is easily done. After you create your special font, with the special shapes and letters (horizontal d, a 5-shaped g, dotless i, dotless j, and some glyph before and after the s) the battle is won.

Adding new variations, as composites glyphs, consisting of your base alphabet coupled with acutes or dots is very fast work (<1 minute each including the mapping).

Your url reference had sample fonts which were totally compatible with FCP. I was able to correct some validate errors!, install them to Windows and use them directly in a Word document. I also used the Insert/Symbol business to get some of the more remote characters.

It does not seem that you have a problem since the font has already been designed, and AFAIK, had all the special letter variations you needed.

(BTW, trying to use MS Word Insert/Symbol to build composite letters is an MS Word problem, not an FCP problem.)

Dick Pape

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Sat Nov 06, 2004 4:09 pm

Dick, if you use spacing modifier acute accent 02CA (Alter 714) then you do get aˊ, however, if you use combining diacritical mark acute accent 0301 (Alter 769) then you get á. The software should make the necessary vertical adjustment Á which it does in Wordpad, but not here apparently, and not in Word, according to Barry.

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Sat Nov 06, 2004 11:16 pm

Hi Bhikkhu ...

I don't think I have contributed any answers with this ...

1. I have always been confused as to which diacritical figures to use -- whether SPACING LETTER, MODIFIER LETTER, COMBINING ACCENT or even something else.

Microsoft Arial Unicode Version 2.98 uses the so-called spacing acute accent (´, decimal 180, U+00B4 or Alt+0180) when forming composites. That would seemingly be the right one for the rest of us?

2. My tests with MS Word using Insert/Symbol gave access to the entire character set -- but only for those glyphs defined. That is, I could not insert a (dotted B) until I had selected the Bunchló font. Since the dotted B had been mapped to ¡ (dec-161 inverted exclam) the shape could be retrieved.

Bunchló mapped the Spacing Acute 0180 to the m-dot character. That comes up when you type Alt+0180 ... and not ' by itself.

3. More on this: the Bunchló font uses the Combining Accent glyph (hex0301/dec 769) to form the composite Á. When you use the keyboard ctl+'+A or the Alt+0192 you get the proper Bunchló Á glyph. Doing the same thing in Arial gets the composite formed with the Spacing Acute. Thus, it must look for the glyph "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE"?

Dick