Contrastive use of kratka and breve

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:13:30 +0300
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela at cs.tut.fi> wrote:

> 2014-07-02 20:34, Philippe Verdy wrote:

> > CGJ would be better used to prevent canonical compositions but it
> > won't normally give a distinctive semantic.

> In the question, visual difference was desired. The Unicode FAQ says:
> “The semantics of CGJ are such that it should impact only searching
> and sorting, for systems which have been tailored to distinguish it,
> while being otherwise ignored in interpretation. The CGJ character
> was encoded with this purpose in mind.”
> http://www.unicode.org/faq/char_combmark.html

Unfortunately, the Unicode FAQs need a thorough review.  There is quite
a bit with a low to zero truth value, especially about CGJ.

> So CGJ is to be used when you specifically want the same rendering
> but wish to make a distinction in processing.

As Philippe has pointed out, a CGJ can affect rendering by encouraging
renders to apply marks in the order they appear in the normalised
texts.  I am puzzled to the difference between diaeresis and umlaut; if
black letter styles do distinguish them, as has been denied, then CGJ
does affect the rendering, for CGJ may be used to distinguish a
diaeresis from an umlaut.

Richard.