Re: Combining characters

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 18:16, James H. Cloos Jr. wrote:
> >>>>> "Owen" == Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:
> 
> >> Now, if I want to render the composite character 4001+4010, how
> >> should I proceed?  Is there a way to map unicode sequences to
> >> actual (physical) fonts.  Prefarably in the form:
> 
> Owen> Not really sure what you are asking - maybe you can be less
> Owen> hypothetical?
> 
> Here is an example.  Emacs' ipa input method supports, eg, a
> miniscule open e w/ tilde.  The bdf fonts in the gnu unifont
> collection includes one w/ the xlfd:  (also in 14 and 24 pix)
> 
> -etl-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-muleipa-1
> 
> that contains the open e w/ tilde as a single character (encoded at
> 0xbb).  In unicode, however, there is no precomposed character for
> that; one must use U+025B LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E and U+0303
> COMBINING TILDE for that.  That is, in utf8, < ɛ̃ >.
> 
> He wants to be able to use a font like the muleiap-1 fonts to display
> such combining sequences.
> 
> (muleipa-1 also has tilda'ed versions of latin small letter alpha,
> latin small letter open o and latin small ligature oe that are also
> not precomposed in unicode.)
> 
> (NB that muleipa-1 was just the first example I thought of; it is
> probably not the one the OP is using, merely similar.)

There is no problem with these type of thing. Generally, what you
do with TrueType fonts, is that you simply don't put such glyphs
in the encoding vector. It's also possible to put them in the
private use area.

Regards,
					Owen