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[Andrew Cunningham]

On 29/02/2008, Mia Kalish <MiaKalish at learningforpeople.us> wrote:

>  I'm a little confused on this one. If we imagine power users who are using
>  the Combine function in UC to create composite characters, then there aren't
>  really any font developers directly involved.
>  What I noticed when I was modifying fonts is that you cannot directly copy
>  and  paste the components - which is essentially the same as the Combine
>  function.
>  I don't know how you would create a diacritic that would be in the right
>  position for the wide "a" and also - without horizontal adjustment - in the
>  right position for the "i".

You need to build an opentype, aat or graphite font.

I'm not a typographer, so take my following comments as indicative,
not authoritative. For OpenType fonts, my understanding is that for
each character you want to add combining diacritics to, you would
create anchor points in each character glyph. separate anchor points
for diacritics above and below the base character. You can also add
anchor points for combining diacritics for those languages where you
need to stack combining diacritics.

In VOLT you'd create the rules to position the various diacritics to
the anchor points. You'd be interested in the following GPOS features:

* MarkToBase attachment (mark): attaches a combining mark to a base glyph.
* MarkToMark attachment (mkmk): attaches a combining mark to another mark.

>  There's also the serifs issue: Serif vowels tend to be much more regular in
>  size than non-Serif vowels . . . that isn't really a font design issue
>  either, unless we want to eliminate one or the other (just kidding).
>  Can you explain what you see here? How you see the designers and software
>  people solving this issue so it becomes automated?

I may be mistaken but what you describe is a design issue, when a font
developer is creating the original design of a typeface.

I though size of fonts would differ from font to font based on the
font metrics the font designer chose to use with any particular
design.

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au
lang.support at gmail.com