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From: dee@cca.CCA.COM (Donald Eastlake)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: I.P.A (Phonetic Alphabet) & Scripts
Message-ID: <27479@cca.CCA.COM>
Date: 28 Apr 88 13:22:53 GMT
References: <417@koel.rmit.oz>
Reply-To: dee@CCA.CCA.COM.UUCP (Donald Eastlake)
Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 29

In article <417@koel.rmit.oz> rcopm@koel.rmit.oz (Paul Menon) writes:

>    Sticking with fonts, does the Mac Font Manager support arbitrary 'accents'
>an any character?  A true IPA character set would need one unless a special
>Word-Processing/Type-Setting program is used.  By 'accents' I mean a set of
>super/sub marks that can be applied to any of the characters in the
>font.  The normal (English) Font Manager allows a very restricted set, namely
>grave, acute, etc and then only to a specific set of characters.  If the new
>Font Manager (or Script Manager) supports exotic scripts like Kanji, etc, then
>does this mean that a font like IPA would need to be a script by itself?  I

Every Font Manager that the MAC has ever had has at least supported
fairly arbitrary non-negative horizontal spacing.  So you can have
whatever types of accents you want above or below or on top of other
characters by just making the accent character advance by zero before
the next character is drawn.  Characters can also kern left or right,
sticking into the character before or after.  So with a fixed width
character set, you could easily set up characters that drew circles or
squares around other characters, for example.

There is no reason at all for IPA to be a script.  Disk #230 from
EduComp, a public domain / shareware Macintosh source claims to have an
IPA on it although I have not used that particular font or Educomp's
services, so I can't really vouch for it.  They are at 742 Genevieve,
Suite D, Solana Beach, CA 92075.
-- 
	+1 617-969-9570		Donald E. Eastlake, III
	ARPA: dee@CCA.CCA.COM	usenet:	{cbosg,decvax,linus}!cca!dee
	P. O. Box N, MIT Branch P. O., Cambridge, MA 02139-0903 USA