Looking at Tahoma, I see that it places the macron over the L dot ($1E38) centred horizontally.
I prefer the macron to be to the far left, centred over the upright of the L.
I also use a narrower macron to compensate for the narrow stroke, and in lowercase ($1E39), which is centred. Likewise, with ī macron and Ī macron.
Should Macron be Left or Centre? Obviously it should not be on the far right.
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Comments
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1e38/fontsupport.htm
I prefer the look of it centered over the dot.
Times New Roman cannot decide what to do. The Regular and Bold have the macron centred, while the italic and bold italic have it centred over the stem.
It does need a shorter macron accent to avoid possible clashes, but it looks much better IMO. Only text in All Capitals could cause a clash, and AFAIK, L dot macron won't ever be preceded by a consonant even in all caps text. A, E, I, O, U are unlikely to be a problem.
I download a PDF of the Brill Typeface user guide and notes. That looks very helpful.
Okay, maybe if you’re setting an all-caps grid of the transliterated Sanskrit alphabet . . . but really?
Here, by the way, is the full set of L diacritics included in the Murty fonts:
[Note horizontal position of below marks. I position these based on optical balance of the whole, which means they are slightly left rather than centred on the width of the baseline stroke of the L.]
The ring below is a variant for the dot below preferred by some publishers.
The acute accent is to indicate stress. I took a crazed completist approach to these, and provided for acute on any vowel, since I'm not aware of stress patterns in all varieties of Sanskrit or other languages that might be transcribed with the Murty fonts.
The tilde is used for a nasalised pronunciation, which some publishers transcribe as m̐l.
The L with diaeresis below is used in transcriptions of Kannada script for the ೞ.
Many romanised transcriptions, in practice, will not use uppercase letters, but for the Murty fonts I provided both upper-, lowercase, and also smallcaps for all.
I think the treatment in John’s sample certainly looks nice aesthetically. However, I’m not sure that I agree that this is a better approach in a general context.
In the “very rare” case where you would encounter ḹ in a word, it would presumably be a grammatical form of a root with vocalic ḷ where the vowel is lengthened, and thus the macron.
Personally, I am not convinced that this kind of macron treatment over the capital stem adequately conveys lengthening in the same way that the macron operates visually over other vowels.
But given the stem-oriented treatment of tilde and acute over L in the Murty fonts, I suppose this macron placement was pretty much logically required.
In partial defense of yesterday’s post: Sure, it should look good and appropriate, but I don’t think that in such a rare case as this there is anything objectively “right.” Both approaches are probably equally defensible.
I checked my copies, and found that only Times Ext Roman was correct. Times New Roman and Bold both have the macron centred over the L, as at fileformat.info, which is inconsistent with the italic and bold italic.