Sep 1, 2021
Hackiest possible support for rendering Unicode combining characters using GNU Unifont

This is the equivalent of backing up a typewriter by one character and overlaying a second letter on the same space.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Detail of a Qemu window showing a few characters being rendered. Top left: an 'à' created from an 'a' and a U+0300 combining grave accent. Having it right at the corner shows how the accent is almost invisible against the window boundary. Middle column: an 'à' under a regular 'g' showing that the accent is again almost invisible against the descender of the character above. Right column: an 'à' to the right of a regular 'g' looks best of all, though the accent is still too high. Bottom half: a list of devanagari vowel diacritics modifying the same consonant. Looks reasonable except for a couple of cases where lines overlap. This is the best we can do with a single glyph for any accent without getting into glyphs for individual ligatures, since it has to work with a large variety of letter shapes.

This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.

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