Re: composite characters and dotless ones

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

Right, and this explains why there is no dotlessj even though there
is a jcircumflex.  Their view is that jcircumlex is j + circumflex,
not doltessj + circumflex.  Bummer.

   I am not sure if I mentioned this before, but in Unicode the canonical
   decomposition of, for example
     <iacute(003D)>
   is
     <i(0069)>+<acute(0301)>
   not
     <dotlessi(0131)><acute(0301)> .

   Indeed, page 6-7 explicitly states that these combinations give two
   distinct characters.  Further, it states that in cases where the dot
   is preserved and the diacritic is added above the dot, the
   decomposition is as a double diacritic:

   <i(0069)>+<overdot(0307)><acute(0301)>

   hmmmm.

   Such decomposition is necessary and for many purposes the canonical
   Unicode one is the only correct one; its being "wrong" for making a
   composite glyph is, of course, irrelevant to Unicode itself (but not
   to typesetting applications that process Unicode documents).


   chris