[XeTeX] On combining diacritics again

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 Jun 2007, at 2:04 pm, Florian Grammel wrote:

>> However, you mentioned needing to use PUA characters from a special
>> font. Is this a font that you own and can modify, or can you persuade
>> the font developer to work on it?
>
> Not really -- that's the reason I ask:
> We just have user-licenses for the font, so we cannot modify it
> ourselves. The developer is a professional (who has to make a living)
> and we have used our funds to pay him to add really many glyphs.
> These can form loads of rare but possible combinations, so doing this
> once and for all would be a lot of work anyway.

Not really. An OpenType implementation equivalent to Cocoa's default  
stacking of the diacritics just requires defining a couple of anchor  
points on each diacritic glyph (which could be automated based on the  
bounding box as a first approximation -- equivalent to what Cocoa  
does -- if you don't want to spend the time to hand-tune every  
position), and similarly a couple of anchors on each base letter  
(again, this could be scripted). Then the actual OpenType lookups are  
essentially trivial. Note that it is *not* necessary to pre-build  
each potential combination.

JK