(Ted Harding) wrote:
On 07-Mar-06 Joerg van den Hoff wrote:hi everybody,I noted the following. when defining .ds Macasek "Mac\['a]\o'\[ah]s'ek .ds macasek "Mac\['a]\[vs]ek .DS \*[Macasek] \*[macasek] .DEone gets an optically pleasing 'scaron' (\[vs] (second line), but a seemingly slightly off-center (to the left) 'caron' (\[ah]) if you overstrike it with the letter 's' (first line).at least if one generates pdf output and really zooms in ... in short, my question is: should \o'\[ah]s' yield exactly the same as \[vs]Not necessarily. It depends: a) If you are using a PS font which includes the s-hacek as a single glyph, and this is accessed, as such, from groff using "\[vs]", then you can expect this to be "perfectly formed" anyway. b) When you use "\o'\[ah]s'" to create the composite character by over striking "\[ah]" with "s", then the alignment may not be perfect. Essentially, "\o'XY'" simply prints "X", then moves back and prints "Y" so that the horizontal centre of "Y" is at the horizontal centre of "X". While one may expect the metrics of "\[ah]" to be well chosen as a compromise for placing it as an accent to any character in a font in this sort of way, there is no guarantee that it is perfect for any particular combination. c) If "\[vs]" is defined as a composite character using groff code (like the code in the "acc" module of s.tmac -- see recent posts), then whether the placement of the hacek is perfect depends on details of the code:-- is it fine-tuned for this particular combination? On the other hand (as in the old way of making accented characters) the groff code is as crude as the "overstrike" method above, then ov course the two would be identical, and may or may not be good. d) If you want "perfect" results, then ideally, when defining groff code for composite characters, you should define each character individually and fine-tune the positioning. Whether you need to do this for any particular composite character depends on how well they fit together without fine-tuning: you can only judge this by eye! Hoping this helps, Ted.
ted, thanks for clarifying this (well, to some extent...). concerning your remark b):I tried it simply with the 'canonical' troff font (Times Roman). in this font the accent generated by overstriking seems off-center to the left in virtually all combinations (most of them of course not useful), see attachment. maybe the metrics of \[ah] are not quite right after all? especially accents over the frequently occuring 'c' and 's' would profit from a slight shift to the right.
but anyway: thanks again. joerg
binFtkA9eeCJc.bin
Description: application/applefile
overstrike_caron.trf
Description: Binary data
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