How to combine Unicode characters?

Combining Unicode Characters

  • Unicode Filter - How do I go about combining diacritics in Unicode with pre-existing letters? I'm baffled. Win XP, using Word. I'm clueless, and I'm working with a deader than the proverbial doornail language (Hint - Middle Eastern Iranian language family).

  • Answer:

    I'm not sure how you'd do this using Word, since I don't think Word allows much kerning control. But ... in InDesign (or another typesetting tool), you can place the diacritic immediately after the letter it works with, and then reduce the kerning on the letter enough so the diacritic is centered above it (or below it, or whatever). You could try this for Word ... If you don't need the document to change with later edits, you could place the diacritic in an object box and position it manually. In effect, you'd be creating a second layer of text. That's not very elegant, but it could work.

AArtaud at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Other answers

This may sound odd, but I'm working at a Help Desk at a university with a lot of dead languages. And to do what you're trying to do, we've found Open Office to work a lot better. Who knows why!

k8t

I'm confoozed. Doesn't the input method depend on the IME you're using?

RavinDave

Are you sure a specific font doesn't exist for that language? http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/fonts.html has a whole bunch of language-specific fonts. I made great use of their IPA font, but haven't tested their others.

librarina

Well, I doubt that there is a specific font for Khotanese, except for Apples, and it would be handmade by my ex-advisor. I have to go back and re-check what characters I need exactly. I need something fairly elegant and use-friendly because I need to be able to search the extant textual corpus, but that's for the suggestions. Open Office sounds like a nice alternative.

AArtaud

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