Does anybody use combining accents?

James Puckett

Are there users for combining accents? They’re out there commercially thanks to the no-effort setup in Glyphs 2. But I wonder if users are catching on.

John Hudson

From a user perspective, combining mark use might be transparent, with combinations of base plus mark(s) input from a single keystroke. In that respect, users might not need to 'catch on'.

Ray Larabie

They're important because it's the only way to type Spin̈al Tap properly.

Paul Miller

In Microsoft Word there are key combinations which will allow you to apply various accents to characters but I don't know if it uses the precomposed composite characters or applies a combining diacritic to the character.

Perhaps I ought to do a little experiment!

Thomas Phinney

There are languages with characters that don't even exist as precombined single characters in Unicode. I think combining accents are pretty common for those (although one can also do them as ligature-like combos with the 'ccmp' feature).

KP Mawhood

@James Puckett Yes please…!

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

On MacOs, the HFS+ filesystem decomposes accented characters, so if you copy-paste a file or folder name that contains an accented letter you’ll end up with combining marks.
Some Vietnamese keyboard layouts use combining marks. Some typos appear on the web, where combining marks end up on the previous or following letter.
If you read Russian or other languages using the Cyrillic alphabet, severals Wikipedia editions use accents to indicate stress on the first line of articles (like some dictionaries do), in most cases these are using combining marks. A whole bunch of Latin languages use combining marks, for example Yoruba, since some accent letters can only be represented with combining marks, as Thomas mentioned.

However, most font shapers normalize to precomposed single accented letters if they exists as characters.

I use a keyboard layout with combining marks. I sometimes face issues where applications don’t normalize character sequences and treat them differently whether they are composed or decomposed. For example, in Firefox searching for é (decomposed with combining mark) will not match é (composed single character). Bing.com gives different results for "Trái" (decomposed) and "Trái" (composed). If they was Unicode compliant, one should be treated as equivalent the other.

As a user of combining marks, because a language I use requires them, I wouldn’t say users are catching on, I’d say fonts are slowly catching on to what the users need.

Michel Boyer

I searched for the characters in the range U+0300 to U+036F that are output by standard (not extended) Ukulele keyboards (Mac keyboards from SIL International) and got the following counts (open image in new window to see full size);

Christian Thalmann

I'm getting an obnoxious trailing whitespace after combined characters on this forum, BTW:



(MacOS Sierra, Firefox)

Mark Simonson

That's strange. It works properly for me with the same combination (macOS Sierra, Firefox).

Christian Thalmann

Apparently I'm using Source Sans Pro as the default typeface. Maybe that's the problem.

Mark Simonson

Looks like Alright Sans to me.

Craig Eliason

On my iPhone and MacBook, I'm not seeing the trailing space though that letter (the one marked "decomposed") is falling back to some similar font that's not quite a match. 

Mark Simonson

Ooh, you're right! I should have looked more closely.

David Perry

I want to like combining marks -- I really do.  But I use precomposed combinations when they exist because the results are much more reliable.  Fonts and apps are gradually getting better, but we still have a ways to go before it all "just works."  Mac users are better off because OS X includes combining marks on one of its system keyboards (the ABC Extended, IIRC; been a while since I checked) and tries to position combining accents properly even if the font doesn't have a <mark> feature.  Neither of these is true on Windows (I'm mostly a Windows user, so no attacks are necessary.)