[B-Greek] Long/short vowels, macrons, and Unicode
John H. Jenkins
jenkins at apple.com
Tue Mar 7 14:07:18 EST 2006
On Mar 7, 2006, at 11:48 AM, Steve Westfall wrote:
> In light of this, I was interested to discover that Unicode's code
> chart for
> "Greek Extended" does not provide a code-point for any vowels
> having both a
> macron and an accent (of any kind). Is this an oversight in
> Unicode, or is
> the combination unnecessary?
>
Unicode was specifically designed so that it would not be necessary
to explicitly encode such accented forms in order to use and display
them properly. Indeed, Unicode originally had none of the characters
in the Greek Extended block but added them at the request of the
Greek national standards body. For stability reasons, no further
precomposed accented Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic will be added to
Unicode; instead, users should use the appropriate decomposed forms.
Support for such forms is a matter of cooperation between the
operating system and the font. For example, Helvetica and Times on
Mac OS X 10.4 will correctly display alpha + macron + acute (or
grave), among others. As characters, these are represented as
something like <U+03B1 U+0304 U+0301>.
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins at apple.com
jhjenkins at mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
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