Re: Inserting the letter i with macron and accent mark.

"TechsysPete" <blue.zero1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I was copying Latin words and definitions when I realized that
inserting an i with the accent mark over the macron looked wrong.

My first reaction is that I would use the acute accent character
(U+00B4, ´), i.e. the spacing clone of the diacritic, after the vowel.
After all, what you write is not actual Latin words as such but
equipped with extra marks that indicate pronunciation. Since these
marks are external to Latin (part of the metalanguage, so to say), they
depend on special conventions, which need to be explained anyway.

In some situations, you might even consider using some completely
different method for indicating the stress, e.g. by bolding or
underlining the stressed vowel, or the stressed syllable.

To be more specific, the accent mark is too far to the left and
could be mistaken as an accent for the previous character.

The problem with using a vowel with a macron and an accent is that such
combinations usually do not belong to Unicode as separate characters
with code points of their own, so even a complete Unicode font would
not contain them - unless the font designer decided to add glyphs that
present a sequence of code points as a single glyph (in which case the
rendering software would need to know about this and be able to map a
sequence of characters to such a glyph).

Thus, the software used needs to draw such a combination by drawing
first a base character (e.g., plain "i" or i with macron) and then one
or more diacritics above it. It needs to pay attention to the shape and
dimensions of the base character in order to put the diacritic into the
right position. This is somewhat complicated, and most text processing
programs don't do it well, or at all.

(Vietnamese characters with multiple diacritic marks are a different
issue, since they exist as precomposed characters in Unicode and
several fonts contain glyphs for them.)

I am
using StarOffice 8 and a font called Code2000. I typically use 'i
with macron' (U+012B) and then insert the accent mark diacritical
(U+0301) to achieve the desired effect

That would be all you need to do _if_ programs supported Unicode
properly. But they don't, and you often get just the equivalent of
printing the base character, backspacing, and printing a fixed glyph
for the diacritic. A program could try to do some positioning that
depends on the base character but isn't really adequate, and it might
even take the diacritic from a different font than the base
character! This may result in anything between fairly good rendering
(by accident) to completely losing the diacritic or just obscuring the
base character.

I don't how StarOffice deals with combining diacritics, but if it does
it rather poorly (as I suspect), there's little you can do beyond
trying different fonts and/or adjusting character spacing. My
experiments with MS Word 2002 suggest that it will be very difficult to
find a font that works for the different vowels (a, e, i, o, u, maybe
y). The accent might be too far to the left for some characters and too
far to the right for other characters.

Playing some more with MS Word 2002, I noticed that typing i with
macron in Times New Roman, then U+0301 in Everson Mono Unicode produces
a rather good appearance. But this is a very fragile approach.

I've tried inserting plain old i and adding two
diacriticals but this looks even worse with the accent mark
overlaping the macron and neither of them looking centered.

That's to be expected; the program has an even bigger challenge.

I admitt
I could be going about this all wrong and there may be another way
to do this that I havn't seen, but I just cannot find it.

As I wrote, I'd primarily try to avoid the problem by using a different
notation.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
.

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