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Unicode Explained
book

Unicode Explained

by Jukka K. Korpela
June 2006
Beginner content levelBeginner
688 pages
26h 18m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Unicode Explained
Some diacritic marks have a regular appearance that deviates from what you might
expect from their name. The Latin capital letter “T” with caron, used in Czech and
Slovak, looks as you’d expect: Ť. However, its lowercase counterpart, Latin small letter
“t” with caron U+0165, has a comma-like diacritic in most fonts: ť. This means that
the diacritic mark looks like a comma or an apostrophe but it is called caron and treated
as caron in Unicode (e.g., in the canonical decomposition). Although this sounds un-
natural, it would also be unnatural to have “T” with caron mapped to, say, “t” with
comma above right in an uppercase-to-lowercase mapping.
Spacing Diacritic Marks
When a combining diacritic mark is applied to a space character, we get the diacritic
itself as a visible character. Alternatively, we might use a character that itself represents
a spacing diacritic mark, often called “spacing clones” of diacritic marks. Such char-
acters appear, for historical reasons, in different blocks, such as Latin-1 Supplement
and Spacing Modifier Letters.
Starting from of Unicode 4.1, the recommendation is to apply a combining diacritic
mark to a no-break space U+00A0 rather than space U+0020. The reason is “potential
conflicts with the handling of sequences of U+0020 space characters in contexts like
XML.” However, the formal definitions still to define decompositions using the space.
For example, the acute ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059610121XCatalog PageErrata