From: freek@phil.ruu.nl (Freek Wiedijk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Font question. Need very weird accents and diactritics for Skt.
Date: 3 Jan 93 16:35:50 GMT
Organization: Department of Philosophy, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

hue@pro-freedom.cts.com (Scott Hudziak) writes:
>
>I've -never- seen the option to put a mark -under- a letter. You can put
>marks above in most fonts. Keycaps (sys software) or Pop-Char may be of
>help to you. All I can tell you is that you can get a long slash with the
>combo 'option-hyphen' and an even longer one with 'Shift-option-slash.' I
>dunnoif that is long enough for you.

Related question: in which word processors is it possible to combine
_arbitrary_ letters with _arbitrary_ accents?

More specifically:

In the Macintosh `Standard Roman Character Set' (Inside Mac, Volume VI,
Appendix E), I find three kinds of characters:

Normal characters
        a               $61
        b               $62
        c               $63
etc.

Accented characters
        aacute          $87
        agrave          $88
        acircumflex     $89
        adieresis       $8A
        aring           $8B
etc.

`Separate' accents
        grave           $60
        acute           $AB
        dieresis        $AC
        circumflex      $F6
        tilde           $F7
        macron          $F8
        breve           $F9
        dotaccent       $FA
        ring            $FB
        cedilla         $FC
        hungarumlaut    $FD
        ogonek          $FE
        caron           $FF

This means that accented letters can be made in two different ways:
for example an _a_ with an acute accent can be made as the single glyph
_aacute_ (hex $87), as well as the superposition of two glyphs, _a_
(hex $61) and _acute_ (hex $AB).

However, there are lots of accented letters that can only be made by
superposition.

For instance, I recently had to enter the following text (it's dutch;
I hope my convention of putting _<a'>_ for the _aacute_ character is
clear):

        <E`>cht nieuw zijn een paar praktische mogelijkheden:
        de drie stok- en staartlengtes, de geringe materi<e">le va-
        riaties, de zelfspati<e">rende kapitalen, de zelfvormende
        `ligaturen' en de twee sierstukjes in elk font (afb. 34).

The initial _E_ had a grave accent, and I was unable to find an
_Egrave_ in the standard complement of characters.  The only way of
typing this was by overstriking an _E_ glyph with a _grave_ glyph.

Therefore, I needed a word processor that offers this possibillity.
And, naturally, the question arose exactly _which_ word processors
have this feature.

I recently found out that Word can do it (but, as always, in a kludgy
manner).  You can overstrike characters _a_ and _acute_ by typing
_\O(a,')_  The _\_ should be read as command-option-backslash, the _'_
as command-option-e.

Command-option-backslash is the escape character for Word's formula
editor.  Surely there should be no need to enter an accented character
as a very small formula!

So, is there another word processor that can do this, & preferably in a
more elegant way?

Freek
--
Third theory of Phenomenal Dynamics:  The difference between
a symbol and an object is quantitative, not qualitative.