Re: [fontforge-users] Combining Diacritical Marks

[Gé v. G. <gev...@gm...>]

David,
I’m also confused about what you’re looking for… but let’s try.

Unicode has two kinds of (separate) diacritical marks: spacing and
combining. So any font editor that lets you work with the Unicode slots for
the combining diacritical marks (CDMs) will suffice.

When you type text using the created font, the OS or the application
program recognizes a CDM from its Unicode number and will treat it
accordingly, that is, it will position it on the previous character (which
I call the "base character") with the help of so-called anchor points
defined in that base character’s glyph in your font.

But from your very last sentence, it seems you want to go beyond Unicode
and create non-standard CDMs. You can put them in the Private-Use Area, but
that means that the above positioning mechanism doesn’t work, as your
character isn’t recognized as a CDM.
So the best you can do for those is to either 1. position the glyph
"averagely", so it looks more or less OK with all intended base glyphs, or
2. create several glyphs for each CDM, each positioned to look good with
one or more intended base glyphs. For example, you could have one version
for upper-case letters and one for lower-case
Which of these options you choose (or, to state it more generally: how many
glyph versions of each "CDM" you want to create) will depend on how
important is ease of use versus typographic quality.

On Sat, 5 Jan 2019 at 00:45, David Myers <dp...@ho...> wrote:

> Hello.
>
> Unicode has glyphs that consist of a primary character and a diacritic
> that is combined with it, but Unicode also has separate encodings for the
> primary characters and for the diacritics so that, in theory, the
> individual diacritics serve as combing diacrical marks which can join onto
> any other Unicode character.
>
> My questions are: How do I create a diacritical mark so that it will join
> in the same basic manner to any primary character that is typed before it?
> If I want to add one to the Private Use Area, how could I achieve this
> combining effect so that it will come out properly when typing in the
> finished font? Is this possible? I have been using a font application
> called BirdFont, and the creator seems to be under the impression there is
> not a way to do this already, at least not in his program. However, he may
> be confused about what I am looking for. Could anyone advise me on whether
> this is possible, and if so, how? Much of my font will depend on creating
> effective combining diacritical marks not represented in Unicode already,
> so this would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> David Myers
>
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