I'm looking for opinions on how best to address the height problems with the A Ring Acute.
There seems to be at least a half dozen workarounds for squeezing it down. In lots of fonts, the diacritics are just stacked up with the apparent intention of letting the user contend with the composition crashing into whatever might be above it. I'm sort of inclined to take this approach myself.
Do the Danes or Norwegians or whomever actually use this character? I don't think I've ever encountered it running loose in the wild anywhere.
Comments
If you don't wish to take the trouble to design them correctly, don't include them in your fonts. If you want to support more languages, I recommend moving the top diacritics to the side of the lower diacritic to save vertical space, and avoid ugly clashes with descenders in the line above.
This is how I design those glyphs in my font Garava, and others.
A Vietnamese user with whom I had some correspondence, told me that the preferred position of the top diacritic is on the right, so A circumflex acute, and A circumflex grave look like this:
Initially, I had placed the grave accent on the left because I thought it looked better.
In Vietnamese, the use of multiple diacritics makes the problem more manageable in that it's a commonplace characteristic of the written language.
The A ring acute is less manageable in the sense that it's a one-off, outlier glyph with an incompatible height to all the others in the alphabets of whatever Scandinavian countries might use it (if they use it at all).
I think your solution of positioning more compact diacritics side-by-side might be best, but I have little idea what might be an acceptable composition to those (possibly non-existent) people who actually use it. Could be, no one really cares.
Including the aringacute, presupposes that you also include a bunch of other specialist characters not normally included in retail fonts. If you, however, do decide that completing a range of characters only hardcore font engineers have ever heard of is crucial to your fontz, this letter is so extremely rare that you better make it look as unassuming as possible: I.e. no merging of ring and acute. Acute above ring, not on the side.
I suppose my reasoning might have been that those type designers probably knew something that I didn't. I'm beginning to think that some glyphs are little more than self-perpetuating anachronisms that are included in many fonts for the same reason I just mentioned, but that almost no one has a need for them.
Is the ring on the letter without the acute suppose to touch the uppercase A, or should it float?
The ring itself, when the font is not too fancy, I am doing thus: two Latin breves welded together at the horns. (The outer contour is a perfect circle, the inner one is an ellipse).
If it is actually used in dictionaries and children's books, though, then, provided one knows if there are other characters also so used in Danish and/or Norwegian, it is legitimate to include it in a font. After all, that's typically where stress accents are used in Russian, or vowel points are used in Hebrew.
I did not grow up there, I was only quoting from memory.