Analysis of combining diacritics support

Ben Laenen benlaenen at gmail.com
Wed Jul 23 16:13:33 UTC 2008


On Tuesday 22 July 2008, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
> - DejaVu has positioning issues

The positioning issue you see is likely a problem that T doesn't have a 
cedilla anchor in Serif. Normally an easy fix.

That's why renderers should have fall-back options (like Qt has). 
Usually these fall backs will give less optimal results, but a lot 
better than nothing at all.

> Given that commercial fonts suck at this, I suspect we won't see the
> combing method used often. Not for Romanian anyway. It seems however
> that adding diacritics to arbitrary letters is useful in Dutch,
> according to this post anyway:
> [http://www.typophile.com/node/2764#comment-99219]

Well, we would need them only in one rare case (when we emphasize 
the "ij" sound, like "íj́" ) As a result the accent on the j is usually 
dropped, so it becomes "íj", but official spelling rules want both 
accents.

Anyway, there are many languages with Latin script that are much worse 
of (a lot of African languages for example), since combining diacritics 
are needed in an awful lot of other languages. Because font foundries 
select their character sets based on the market demand, they don't see 
a lot of merit in adding glyphs and features that are only needed 
there.

So, that's basically something we should exploit with free/open fonts, 
to give us the lead in these areas.

Greetings
Ben




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