Placing tone marks

Azamat Kodzoev

I'm making a typeface with an opportunity to place a tone mark for stress on syllable. In cyrillics it's usually an acute, but what glyph exactly acutecmb or acutetonemark? Also how that will work with caps and lowercases? is there a need for a feature for that? Is there usual practices?

Thank you for any response in advance.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

I’d recommend using acutecmb instead of acutetonemark.

The characters U+0341 acutetonemark will be normalized to U+0301 acutecmb by some text processing systems anyway since Unicode defines U+0341 as canonically equivalent to U+0301. U+0341 acutetonemark really doesn’t have much use in practice. Historically is has been encoded for Vietnamese but there is no need for a distinction. If you have it either make it behave like U+0301 or double-encode acutecmb as both.

You’ll need an acutecmb.cap and a ccmp or calt feature with a lookup that substitutes acutecmb by acutecmb.cap after an uppercase (and also an uppercase and a mark below if you want to support that scenario).

Azamat Kodzoev

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye said:

I’d recommend using acutecmb instead of acutetonemark.

The characters U+0341 acutetonemark will be normalized to U+0301 acutecmb by some text processing systems anyway since Unicode defines U+0341 as canonically equivalent to U+0301. U+0341 acutetonemark really doesn’t have much use in practice. Historically is has been encoded for Vietnamese but there is no need for a distinction. If you have it either make it behave like U+0301 or double-encode acutecmb as both.

You’ll need an acutecmb.cap and a ccmp or calt feature with a lookup that substitutes acutecmb by acutecmb.cap after an uppercase (and also an uppercase and a mark below if you want to support that scenario).

Thanks a lot! That is exactly what I needed!

Azamat Kodzoev

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye said:

I’d recommend using acutecmb instead of acutetonemark.

The characters U+0341 acutetonemark will be normalized to U+0301 acutecmb by some text processing systems anyway since Unicode defines U+0341 as canonically equivalent to U+0301. U+0341 acutetonemark really doesn’t have much use in practice. Historically is has been encoded for Vietnamese but there is no need for a distinction. If you have it either make it behave like U+0301 or double-encode acutecmb as both.

You’ll need an acutecmb.cap and a ccmp or calt feature with a lookup that substitutes acutecmb by acutecmb.cap after an uppercase (and also an uppercase and a mark below if you want to support that scenario).

Additional question acutecmb ment to be kerned with letters or is it must be made with anchors (hypothesising)? Or maybe I created it wrongly — [zero width] [negative left metric] [positive right metric]

Thomas Phinney

Combining marks such as acutecmb are positioned with anchors, rather than kerning.