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

TechsysPete wrote:

Hello all,

I was copying Latin words and definitions when I realized that
inserting an i with the accent mark over the macron looked wrong. To
be more specific, the accent mark is too far to the left and could be
mistaken as an accent for the previous character. 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 but, as I said, the accent is too far
left. 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. Does anyone (Jukka?) know how to get
the accent mark centered? 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.

To be thorough, I actually have been able to center the accent over the
i with macron, but this involved adding a 6pt space, and inserting the
accent over that at a much higher font size, making it appear over the
i perfectly, but then there is this looming space in the word that
looks aweful, so this is no solution.

The two answers you've had so far confirm that (1) you're using an
inferior word processor and (2) you're using a lousy (because
Unicode-based) font.

Take a look at *The World's Writing Systems*, which I typeset (1993-5)
in FrameMaker v.3 on a Mac using any number of (roman) fonts from
Ecological Linguistics, which contained no more than 222 characters (255
less the 32 control codes and the one control code in the middle
somewhere). Each font contains all the composite characters needed for
some reasonably delimited set of languages (such as "Slavic" or "Baltic"
or transliterated "Indic" or "Semitic"), and/or "floating" diacritics
that center properly over/under the letters they're used with; some
diacritics appear as more than one character, with different widths so
they sit properly over/under different letters -- m n l for instance.
(This is also done systematically for Hebrew, so the vowels appear
properly under the stem of r and d, etc., not centered under the letter
as almost every Windows font does.)

Also, you should be able to "nudge" characters in four directions by
fractions of a point -- even MSWord lets you do this, but only in .05
pt. increments.

Someone mentioned Gentium -- which has zillions of composite characters
(which word processor will call the composed glyphs when you type the
character in terms of letter + diacritics?). It looks great on screen,
but printed on the page it's pretty anemic. Though the one book I have
that uses it appears to be CRC done on a 300 dpi printer (not even 600
dpi!) and not on proper typesetting hardware.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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