2011/11/14 Karl Pentzlin <[email protected]>: > If anybody has a convincing example of a tilde spanning over more than > two characters, please tell, maybe then a revision of WG2 N4078 or a > supplemental document for it can be made, containing that sequence.
Change the tilde for the macron (or overbar), and you'll get plenty of examples. Even cases where you'll need multiple macrons over a span of many characters. For now, for example, it's almost impossible to represent common things like Roman numbers using multiple macrons reliably (even when using a CSS emulation with top borders, you can just add one, with lots of complications, don't speak about plain-text). Yes the case of diacritics applying to multiple bases, has been deliberately forgotten, and the mere introduction of "double" diacritics is a hack that solves only a part of the problem and in fact only solves a small part of the problem, while also breaking the character identity of the diacritics themselves. In aparte, I'm still looking for the encoding of a double macron/overbar that really works, and that can join with subsequent macrons/overbars at the same height (most fonts place the diacritics isolately, at positions that depend on the base character, for example lower positions for lowercase letters than for uppercase). Unicode continues to argue that the 2D layout and structure of character clusters is not encodable as plain-text, and I still think this is a bad position. I'm not advovating a positional system (with coordinates and sizes) but just the encoding of the core structure of these clusters, because they are semantically needed and are arguably plain-text and independant of the fonts used.
