Analysis of combining diacritics support

Vasile Gaburici vgaburici at gmail.com
Tue Jul 22 20:51:32 UTC 2008


Here's something that will make Nicolas proud. Following the
discussion from [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455981]
I've looked at the level of support in Fedora of combining diacritics
for Romanian. The summary:

- Charis & Doulos SIL work perfectly
- Linux Libertine works too, but pango complains about a GSUB error;
fontmatrix results differ a bit (probably because of this)
- DejaVu has positioning issues
- Liberation and Minion Pro (and presumably most commercial fonts)
don't support combining, so pango steals diacritics from another font.
The result is pretty bad.

You'll find the test here: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/comb.tar
I'm too tired right now to write a description for each screenshot,
but if something is unclear, ask and I'll reply tomorrow.

Given that commercial fonts suck at this, I suspect we won't see the
combing method used often. Not for Romanian anyway. It seems however
that adding diacritics to arbitrary letters is useful in Dutch,
according to this post anyway:
[http://www.typophile.com/node/2764#comment-99219]




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