I'm trying to adapt linux and openoffice for handling caracters from 
west africa (lyele from gurunsi ethnics)...
I have to handle various latin cars, and some ipa cars, all with 
multiple diacritics (like: IPA open o + tilde + acute)
Openoffice won't render well multiple diacritics (the tilde and the 
acute won't be stacked as defined in unicode 4 specs, but written in the 
same place). Neither do other apps like mozilla... Is that a feature 
that will be handled in the future?

I figure linux mandrake is only unicode 2.2 compliant... is that true?

Of course I can design my own diacritics glyphs, but where to put them 
in unicode? there are 5 unused spaces in diacritics, should it be ok?

But when I design a font with fontographer, and put my special diacritic 
(non spacing mark tilde + acute) in this space, openoffice won't render 
it well (like spacing mark)... Well, open office is quite buggy when I 
use my own font... any idea of the mistake I made creating the font?

And a good font utility (better than fontographer? my version is 4.1, 
quite old eh?)

thanks

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Etienne de Boissezon wrote:

> Is that a feature that will be handled in the future?

You should ask Doris about that.

> Of course I can design my own diacritics glyphs, but where to put them
> in unicode?

If you make your own fonts, don't bother with "floating accents".
Create only precomposed characters. There is a wide range for
user-defined characters in Unicode.

> And a good font utility (better than fontographer? my version is 4.1,
> quite old eh?)

Fontographer 4.1.x is the latest version of Fontographer.

Etienne de Boissezon wrote:
 
> And a good font utility (better than fontographer? my version is 4.1,
> quite old eh?)

Old and will not be updated or maintained.

Try Fontlab http://www.fontlab.com
 
> thanks

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Etienne de Boissezon wrote:

> Of course I can design my own diacritics glyphs,

I'd go along with others who recommended to define your own accented
characters, instead of trying to work with "combining" characters -
for which support seems to be less good (and not only in OpenOffice).

> but where to put them in unicode?

I'd recommend you check the latest Unicode tables to see if your
characters have an assigned code yet, and, if not, then use the
Private Use Area.

> there are 5 unused spaces in diacritics, should it be ok?

No.  I feel sure that isn't how Unicode is meant to work, and it's
storing up problems for when Unicode assigns those currently-
unassigned codes at some future time.  Which is why they assigned a
PUA.

* Etienne de Boissezon <edbz.pas.de.spam@free.fr> [2004-04-15 21:31]:
> I have to handle various latin cars, and some ipa cars, all with 
> multiple diacritics (like: IPA open o + tilde + acute)

This works better in KWord, the KDE word processor. There, this specific
sequence (ɔ̃́), as well as others I tried, are displayed nicely - only not
with every font. I get good results with Code 2000 or Gentium, but with
Verdana or Vera the diacritics appear after the base letter.

You can get Gentium here:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium

And Code 2000 here:

http://home.att.net/~jameskass/

> I figure linux mandrake is only unicode 2.2 compliant... is that true?

It depends on the specific application... Some work better than others.
And I'm sure that support will improve in the future. Also note that you
need fonts that support the features you want.

> And a good font utility (better than fontographer? my version is 4.1, 
> quite old eh?)

A free outline font editor that runs natively on Linux is FontForge:

http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

It used to be called PfaEdit - the Mandrake version you have may already
contain it with that name.

-- 
Alexandros Diamantidis * adia@hellug.gr