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Unicode decomposition question


Λύχνις Δαν

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Hi ya,

 

  I am working on a typing practice tool for Ancient Greek and have hit an anomaly which I want to understand.

 

  The way the tool works is you cut and paste some text into the tool as a practice text. It feeds you a line at a time to copy and it then compares what you typed with what you pasted and highlights differences. Now, bearing in mind that the tool is in development and not bugless I have the following issue.

 

  This stretch of text from Epitetus, Enchirdion : Ἐγχειρίδιον 1·1 ¶ Τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφ̓ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφ̓ ἡμῖν.

 

  contains this particular sequence of chars ἐφ̓ .

 

  This looks like smooth breather over ε followed by φ followed by apostrophe for the elided ι.

  Now when I try to type this I can only enter the final apostrophe as apostrophe (or smooth breather) and space. But when I compare that to what was pasted from Accordance they do not match.

 

  Now the Unicode encoding is different - thus in that sense the tool is working :) :

 

  From Accordance : U+03B5 U+0313 U+03C6 U+0313  

  From typing using the Windows 10 Greek Polytonic : U+03B5 U+0313 U+03C6 U+1FBF 

 

  Now, U+0313 is the combining comma above, also known as Greek psili and smooth breathing mark.

  U+1FBF is an extended composed character combining U+0020 and U+0313.

 

  With that laborious preamble I have these questions.

 

  1. Now when I render the above text in Accordance font the U+313 is rendered to the right of the φ, but in Cardo it renders over the φ.  Now I initially I thought this was a bug in Cardo handling but now I'm not so sure. It is supposed to be combined with the preceding character, though so far as I know a psili over a φ does not ever occur.

 

In Accordance font: 

 

post-32023-0-57389400-1592673092_thumb.png

 

In Cardo font:

 

post-32023-0-13517400-1592673106_thumb.png

 

For reference this is in the Edge browser on Windows 10.

 

  2. Before doing final comparison of the reference text and the line the user typed I run an NCD conversion over both the reference string and what is typed. Now, it turns out that U+1FBF has now NCD so the two strings though they might look the same, are actually different. It does have an NKCD to U+0020 and U+0313 which would also fail to match. I have several Greek keyboards installed and I cannot produce U+03C6 followed by U+0313 for φ̓ . So I am wondering if there is an issue in the Unicode export for this character combination. Could you comment ?

 

Thx

Daniel

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I checked Scaife and they encode  as U+1F10 U+03C6 U+02BC. So the ἐ is a precomposed, which decomposes as Accordance has it now, but the trailing apostrophe they encode as U+02BC which is an apostrophe.

I cannot type this apostrophe either alas.

 

Thx

D

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