Re: [Freefont-bugs] Approaching MES-1 compliance

[Panayotis Katsaloulis]

On 11/15/05, Primoz PETERLIN <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Still, I believe some confusion concerning Greek accents, which stems from
> the Unicode standard, remains. On the page where combining diacritics are
> listed, one learns that U+0301 = accent = oxia = tonos (and similarly for
> U+0300 = grave = varia). Yet on the page on basic (i.e. monotonic) Greek,
> a separate non-combining tonos (U+0384) looks distinctively different
> (steeper) from U+0301 (which looks the same as non-combining acute,
> U+00B4). And a little further on, non-combining oxia (U+1FFD) is listed,
> looking identical to tonos (U+0384) and of course different from acute.

I have looked at the problem you note here.
Basically you are right: it is supposed that tonos=oxia and probably
tonos=oxia=acute.

The problem is though a bit more complicated (like always). In old
scripts the oxia is almost as steep as in U+0384 and not as in U+0301.
While probably they serve a similar purpose, the glyph is a bit
different.

Things become even more complicated in modern greek language. Sometime
around 1980 the modern greek grammar changed into a system where only
one accent was possible. For this reason all text afterwards used an
even steeper accent, which sometimes was just a small vertical line or
even a dot ( I am talking about U+0384). This lead to a different
glyph with U+1FFD which *had* to retain the original slant.

I have talked a bit about this problem with other i18n members here in
Greece and we thought that we should do what others have done: if the
font covers the ancient greek glyphs we should leave the slant to
tonos, if not we can even use a shape depending on the style of the
font. Since freefont covers ancient greek too, U+0384 and  U+1FFD
should be the same.

About the U+0384 and U+0301... I believe that they shouldn't be the
same, but of course it's open to discussions...


--
Δεν περιμένω τίποτε παρά μόνο όσα εγώ προκαλώ