Re: composed characters question and suggestions for quail-cyrillic-*

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:56:20 +0100 Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> wrote: 

JR> Ted Zlatanov wrote:
>> It really looks unpleasant in the font recorded here, taking up two rows
>> so the accent can be displayed alone on top of the letter, so I'm
>> curious if Emacs will pick the right appearance if the font has an
>> accented version of the character.

JR> No. There are no unicode codepoints for those accented characters
JR> AFAICS so we can't do the substitution within Emacs. The only way to
JR> combine them would be if the font contained GSUB (glyph substitution)
JR> tables with entries for those sequences of characters, and Emacs had
JR> been told to use font-shape-text for displaying Cyrillic (currently it
JR> is only used for Indic and some South East Asian scripts, but should
JR> be for Arabic as well). The library that Emacs uses for shaping
JR> (libotf/m17n-flt or on Windows uniscribe) might need some knowledge of
JR> those accented characters as well, I'm not entirely sure of how glyph
JR> shaping all fits together.

I understand better now.  I'll work without composition.  How do I
generate composed characters for Quail mappings?  I couldn't figure it
out with compose-chars.

I found accented a and o in the Latin-1 map, and accented u (у) is not
available by itself.  I'd like to get the accented у character for
completeness, but Latin-* only has an accented y with the accent going
in the wrong direction (ý).  It's probably more proper to do the
Cyrillic аоu(у) as composed characters, but I don't know.

Accented e and i were in the Cyrillic map and look fine.  These accented
characters are rare enough that it doesn't matter; in common usage only
ѝ is found (in Bulgarian, at least).  The others are used only if the
writer wants to emphasize which syllable to stress upon pronunciation,
as in a dictionary, AFAIK.

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:11:19 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote: 

>> I'll be glad to implement the Quail changes if they are OK with
>> everyone.  I didn't go ahead and implement them because I'm not familiar
>> with any existing conventions; maybe there's a reason why they have not
>> been added yet.

EZ> Please go ahead.  In my experience, most omissions in the input
EZ> methods are not intentional, they are just because no one cared enough
EZ> to include them.

Thanks.  I did:

	* quail/cyrillic.el: Add quotation marks, paragraph symbol, angled
	brackets, number symbol, and accented aeio to cyrillic-translit.

The quotation marks are both ‚‘ and „“ (plus «» which are also common).
Let me know if I've missed anything.

I can add these to the other cyrillic-* methods if people think it's
useful.

Thanks
Ted