Re: [9fans] grëp (rhymes with creep) and cptmp

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

On Mon Nov 30 06:28:25 EST 2009, rogpeppe@gmail.com wrote:
> now just some handling of combining characters to do :-)

i assume you mean "now just some handling of combining characters
to do.  :)", not "now just some handling of combining characters
to do ☺".  :-)

of course the problem with combining characters is that they're
metafont hidden inside a character set.  unicode doesn't limit
the decorations one can put on a letter. so a + hat + hat +
+ breve is just a fine character.  in fact if i haven't gotten mixed
up, that's a romization of an archaic cyrillic character that's still
common in surnames.  there's no reason you can't put that all
in a circle.

so given that, we know there's no requirement for a precombined
form.  the easy approach of just turning x + combiners into
x' which can be decomposed into x + combiners won't work, in
general.

(doing as mac and decomposing everything seems excessively hard
on libdraw.  what if successive calls to string() split a combiner?)

maybe we can live with combine everything combineable.
it could be an improvement.

- erik