Harder intermediate forms of characters

The whole truth about MB_PRECOMPOSED and MB_COMPOSITE

Sorting it all Out — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:02:24 GMT

As a by the way, this blog does NOT represent anything beyond my own personal thoughts. You could even

Frost's The Form Not Taken

Sorting it all Out — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:31:45 GMT

Over in the Suggestion Box, Aaron asked: Hi again - question about one of your favorite codepages - 1258

re: Harder intermediate forms of characters

Dean Harding — Tue, 16 May 2006 06:53:42 GMT

Igor: That's probably the font more than anything. I'd say that for #1 and #3, Uniscribe is finding a precomposed glyph 'a' with ogonek in the font, then "manually" putting the acute in place, while for #2 and #4 it's doing it the other way around.

And my guess is that ogonek on the precomposed glyph looks slightly different to the non-precomposed ogonek.

But that's just a guess...

re: Harder intermediate forms of characters

Igor Tandetnik — Mon, 15 May 2006 21:12:42 GMT

Re: modern fonts ... will treat all four strings as ... appearing ... equal

Actually, reading your post with IE6 on WinXP SP2, #1 and #3 look a little bit differently from #2 and #4. In the former the ogonek is correctly attached to the letter 'a'. In the latter, the ogonek is shifted one pixel to the right.

re: Harder intermediate forms of characters

Dan Manchester — Mon, 15 May 2006 20:16:31 GMT

Michael,

Thanks for the great blog. Your mention of intermedate forms reminded me of something I saw recently when working with Vietnamese text on Windows.

By way of background, I sometimes need to encode text via a legacy codepage. Word 2003's ability to do the needed conversion generally works out very well for me.

However, on the occasion in question, Word was unwilling to encode many of the accented characters--for example, an "e" with a circumflex and an acute accent--found in my Vietnamese text. I figured that these characters had to somehow be supported by codepage #1258, so I investigated further.

It turned out that the characters that Word wouldn't encode were generally pre-composed characters. However, after I manually decomposed them--for the aforementioned example, I swapped in an "e" with a circumflex and added a combining acute accent--Word produced a usable encoded version.

It seems like Word could do this decomposition itself without too much trouble. Is that a feature that has simply never been added? Or are there complexities here that I'm not considering?