Everything about Combining Diacritical Marks totally explained
In
digital typography,
combining characters are
characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the
combining diacritical marks (including
combining accents).
Unicode also contains many
precomposed characters, so that in many cases it's possible to use both combining diacritics and precomposed characters, at the user's or application's choice. This leads to a requirement to perform
Unicode normalization before comparing two Unicode strings and to carefully design encoding converters to correctly map all of the valid ways to represent a character in Unicode to a legacy encoding to avoid data loss.
In Unicode, the main block of combining diacritics for European languages and the
International Phonetic Alphabet is U+0300–U+036F. Combining diacritical marks are also present in many other blocks of Unicode characters. In Unicode, diacritics are always added after the main character. It is thus possible to add several diacritics to the same character, although as of 2006, few applications support correct rendering of such combinations.
OpenType
OpenType has the
ccmp "feature tag" to define glyphs that are compositions or decompositions involving combining characters.
Unicode ranges
- Combining Diacritical Marks (0300–036F)
- Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (1DC0–1DFF)
- Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (20D0–20FF)
- Combining Half Marks (FE20–FE2F)
IPA symbols,
U+0346 ͆:
dentolabial;
U+0347 ͇:
alveolar;
U+0348 ͈: strong
articulation
U+0349 ͉: weak articulation
U+034A ͊:
denasal
Codepoints U+034B–034E are IPA diacritics for
disordered speech:
U+034B ͋: nasal escape;
U+034C ͌: velopharyngeal friction;
U+034D ͍: labial spreading;
U+034E ͎: whistled articulation;
U+034F is the "
combining grapheme joiner" (CGJ) and has no visible glyph
Codepoints U+035C–0362 are
double diacritics, diacritic signs placed across two letters.
Codepoints U+0363–036F are medieval superscript letter diacritics, letters written directly above other letters appearing in medieval Germanic manuscripts, but in some instances in use until as late as the 19th century. For example, U+0364 is an
e written above the preceding letter, to be used for
Early Modern High German umlaut notation, such as
uͤ for Modern German
ü.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Combining Diacritical Marks'.
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