Umlaut vs. diaresis

Umlaut vs. diaresis

[mari.voipio]

[This message includes lots of linguistics and quite little computing and
ConTeXt and there are lots of special characters [esp. umlauts] in the
text. You've been warned.]

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Hans Hagen wrote:
> Subject: Re: Font problems (special characters, URW)
>
> At 12:49 PM 4/26/2002 +0300, mari.voipio@iki.fi wrote:
> >I agree - all my ä:s (\"a), ö:s (\"o) and Å:s (\aa) typed directly with a
> >Finnish keyboard look kind of funny in the ConTeXt output, because the
> >umlauts/rings are so high up.  Also to my eye \aumlaut and \oumlaut are a
> >lot closer to what I'm used to.
>
> is this language dependent? If so, we can remap \adiaeresis cum suis onto
> \aumlaut in finish; keep in mind that the adiearesis may use glyphs while
> umlauts use composed characters

Yes, I would say it can be language dependent. Different languages use "a
with dots" and "o with dots" for different reasons (to express varying
linguistic phenomena) and that might affect their looks, too - but I'm not
sure about this, I'm talking here from a professional linguist's point of
view, my typesetting skills are small.

What I can tell you is how the Nordic languages view the above mentioned
characters and use them:

Most Nordic languages use umlauts/diaeresis: Swedish has å, ä, ö, Finnish
uses mostly ä and ö and occasionally å (Swedish being the second official
language of Finland), Danish and Norwegian have å (in placenames still
sometimes written "aa"). In these languages we cannot talk about the
"real" umlaut, i.e. pronunciation of a vowel changing because of other
vowels or as marker of a verb's time etc.  Finnish _never_ had anything
like that and the Scandinavian languages lost the connection hundreds of
years ago. This can among others be seen in the way we sort text, a and ä
are separate characters: Finnish/Swedish alphabet goes
a,b,c,...,x,y,z,å,ä,ö and Norwegian/Danish alphabet goes
a,b,c,...,x,y,z,æ,ø,å/aa (i.e. Aabenraa and Åbenrå are sorted similarly).

Thus, in our minds, ä and ö are "glyphs", we don't think about them as
composed characters. Icelandic is a trickier case, because it does have a
real umlaut a->ö, but I think they also think of "ö" as a glyph, at least
they sort it separately in dictionaries and there are words where ö
appears without the umlaut phenomen (like computer=tölva).

The result of the above is that we usually place the dots (diaeresis) or
rings quite close to the rest of the character as they are parts of the
same glyph. In ConTeXt the closest presentation of this seems to be, funny
enough, \aumlaut and \oumlaut while there isn't any fix to å (a ring); /aa
(or å directly from my Finnish keyboard) really looks odd in the ConTeXt
output as the ring is very thin and quite high up, looks a bit like it is
about to fly away.  :-)

However, to me this is a minor problem as long as I get the letters with
diaeresis to show up at all and *that* has been solved couple of weeks
back already with \enableregime[il1]. The exact position of the dots over
a and o and the ring over a belongs to the "I'd like to see this fixed
[before I start writing my master's in Swedish]"  category rather that
"must fix".

As I said earlier, I can easily provide pictures to illustrate the
problem, explaining it in words feels a bit inadequate. I also apologise
to anyone whose email program didn't like my special characters, I'm aware
that they may look very odd in some clients.

Mari Voipio
(in my other life student of Scandinavian languages at Helsinki
University; in this life just a common technical writer wanting to use
ConTeXt for my manuals in umpteen languages, Swedish included...)

Re: Umlaut vs. diaresis

[Eckhart Guthöhrlein]

Am Die, 2002-05-14 um 12.24 schrieb mari.voipio@iki.fi:
> The result of the above is that we usually place the dots (diaeresis) or
> rings quite close to the rest of the character as they are parts of the
> same glyph. In ConTeXt the closest presentation of this seems to be, funny
> enough, \aumlaut and \oumlaut while there isn't any fix to å (a ring); /aa
> (or å directly from my Finnish keyboard) really looks odd in the ConTeXt
> output as the ring is very thin and quite high up, looks a bit like it is
> about to fly away.  :-)

I also wondered about the odd appearance of \Aring (when using my
favorite unit, \Angstrom). The reason is, as far as I have traced it,
that context defaults to the ae fonts. The respective glyphs in the ec
fonts look much better.
I have been absent from ec / type1 issues for some time, so a question
from my part: Are the freely available type1 versions of these fonts
mature enough and included in the major distributions, so they could be
used instead of the ae fonts by default? If so, I think this should be
considered.

Eckhart

Re: Umlaut vs. diaresis

[Hans Hagen]

At 08:08 PM 6/5/2002 +0200, Eckhart Guthöhrlein wrote:
>Am Die, 2002-05-14 um 12.24 schrieb mari.voipio@iki.fi:
> > The result of the above is that we usually place the dots (diaeresis) or
> > rings quite close to the rest of the character as they are parts of the
> > same glyph. In ConTeXt the closest presentation of this seems to be, funny
> > enough, \aumlaut and \oumlaut while there isn't any fix to å (a ring); /aa
> > (or å directly from my Finnish keyboard) really looks odd in the ConTeXt
> > output as the ring is very thin and quite high up, looks a bit like it is
> > about to fly away.  :-)
>
>I also wondered about the odd appearance of \Aring (when using my
>favorite unit, \Angstrom). The reason is, as far as I have traced it,
>that context defaults to the ae fonts. The respective glyphs in the ec
>fonts look much better.
>I have been absent from ec / type1 issues for some time, so a question
>from my part: Are the freely available type1 versions of these fonts
>mature enough and included in the major distributions, so they could be
>used instead of the ae fonts by default? If so, I think this should be
>considered.

there is the (bulky) cm super set (never tried them) which you can give a try

also, there's a user group project going on with regards to a "replacement" 
for aer/plr/csr, so a kind of super-ec thing, non virtual type 1, also with 
chars like euro; that is a good moment to improve the aring

Hans
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                                   Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma@wxs.nl
                       Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
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Re: Umlaut vs. diaresis

[Hans Hagen]

At 01:24 PM 5/14/2002 +0300, mari.voipio@iki.fi wrote:

>[This message includes lots of linguistics and quite little computing and
>ConTeXt and there are lots of special characters [esp. umlauts] in the
>text. You've been warned.]

Thanks for the explanation.

It is no problem to create a couple of language dependent feature sets (so 
called language specifics) where we map for instance the diaeresis glyphs 
onto umlaut or other ones; same for aring.

something like:

\let\adiaerisis\aumlaut

depending on the language.

We need to do this for your languages as well as german and/or others.

At the same time (to pick up an old idea) we can make a manual which 
explains such language specific typographic features (also think of spacing 
issues).

For that i need decent (non offending) pieces of text for testing and 
demonstrating things.

How about that?

Hans

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                   Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma@wxs.nl
                       Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
  tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        information: http://www.pragma-ade.com/roadmap.pdf
                     documentation: http://www.pragma-ade.com/showcase.pdf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------