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I was implementing the 'hist' feature in a font which maps s to long s, and it initially seemed reasonable to me to include all accented forms of s in this feature as well, but I quickly realized that this would prove rather problematic for scedilla which, apart from looking really strange would play havoc with the fonts bounding box (the form of long s being used has a descender).
I had no qualms about dropping scedilla.hist altogether since AFAIK all of the languages which use this character weren't even written using the Latin script until after long s had became obsolete.
I was wondering, though, if anyone knows which diacritics *were* actually in use at the time when long s was still used.
I'm tempted to only include sdotaccent (for Irish) and to drop everything else. I've seen long s + caron in some fonts, but those have all been blackletter faces which included long s as the base form and which, I suspect, included long s + caron simply because scaron is part of the standard windows character set.
Thoughts?
André
23 Jun 2012 — 11:19am
A good starting point would be uni1E9B – uni1E9D (from the Latin Extended Additional Unicode Block).
24 Jun 2012 — 7:38am
Thanks for the reference -- I was unaware that longs + dotaccent had its own codepoint.
The other characters in this range are mediaeval scribal abbreviations. Just to clarify, I wasn't planning on adding additional codepoints to support mediaeval usage. I was just wondering which s+diacritic sequences which are currently in use were also used at the time when long s was used, since many modern diacritical marks are relatively recent innovations.
André