Dear colleagues,
My apologies for missing today's meeting. I have a couple of thoughts, should we get to the combining diacritics discussion.
1) Because we have chosen Courier New as one of our 3 primary fonts, if we find that there are issues with it that is sufficient to say we have a critical problem. Even if we don't see the same issue in other fonts. (If we decide that we don't care about problems which occur primarily in Courier New, then I submit that we need to select another constant width font. And go back and reevaluate ALL of the potential variant candidates we have examined so far.)
2) The cases where a combining diacritic in Courier New merely displaces the subsequent letter, inserting a space containing just the diacritic, are an irritation. But not really a serious problem.
However, in any case where the combining diacritic ends up ON the subsequent letter I believe we must remove that letter/diacritic combination from our repertoire. We should include a list of the cases we have rejected, and explain why, in the document. Then, should the Unicode Consortium at some point create an appropriate pre-composed code point, it can be added to the repertoire. But until and unless that happens, the potential for mistaken identity is simply unacceptable.
Regards,
Bill Jouris
Inside Products
bill.jouris@insidethestack.com
831-659-8360
925-855-9512 (direct)