From: "Mark Odegard" <markodegard@...>

>One I have noticed is that the combining diacritics
>tend to not center themselves correctly over or under
>the letter. This might also be an artifact of what
>browser you use, and what edition it is.

Actually it's a relic of the font technology (TrueType).

The combining diacritics are meant to be placed in relation to the previous
character as indicated by the dotted lines in the glyph pictures, but
TrueType fonts don't have the ability to place characters this way. The
"combining" characters are actually regular characters with zero width and
their shape to the left of its declared edge.

Example: (the | character shows the leftmost edge of the character)
|` -- regular accent
`| -- combining accent

Since these fonts (Lucida, etc) are mostly proportional, the amount of space
the diacritic has to go backwards isn't a fixed number, and it's likely
based on the average width of a character. But even in a monospaced font
it'd be difficult to make a typographically satisfying solution (the accent
on an 'a' should be lower than that on an 'A', for example).

Combining diacritics are my favorite part of Unicode and I can't wait till
UniPad can manage them properly so I can ditch using Word for them. ;p


*Muke!

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