[Freefont-bugs] font height: Latin letters with stacked accents

[Steve White]

Hi, all!

I think I have solution to the height problem for Latin characters
with stacked accents.

You will have seen a recent discussion that touched upon the old line
height problem in FreeFont.  Once again, the issue involves
        * poor standard for specifying a font's line height
        * FreeFont having ranges with high and low glyphs

I've been looking for a way to have the combined glyph contained in
the bounding box given by the font height within the constraints of
        Unicode compliance
        Legibility
        Existing glyphs for letters and accents

This is not a problem special to FreeFont.

I read here a solution
        http://www.typophile.com/node/35221
The judgement of several people there is that the stacking of the
accents carrys information, and shouldn't be altered.

The proposed solution is to slightly reduce the height of the main
letter to make space for the accents.

I like this solution.

These letters are outlandishly modified already.  Insisting that the
glyphs remain unchanged results in either the font height being
globally increased, or precious accents being chopped off.  These
results are worse than the letter glyph squatting a bit, and actually,
I think it somehow looks right.

The main concern is that some letters (especially the O) could be
confused with their lowercase counterparts.  But at a 90% scaling,
they are still heigher than the lowercase, and the overall look of the
two is distinct.

I have simply scaled the main letter by 90% vertically, (except for
Aringacute and Abrevehook, which needed 85%).  In CVS.

Now, of course, scaling isn't very nice:  the better thing to do would
be to re-work the glyphs so the stem widths are consistent with the
rest of the font.  Call this a first step, a proof-of-concept.

The characters affected are:

Latin Extended-A
        U-dieresis-acute -grave -caron
        A-ring-acute
Latin Extended Additional
        E-macron-grave -acute
        I-dieresis-acute -grave -caron
        O-tilde-acute -dieresis
        O-macron-acute -grave
        S-acute-dot
        S-caron-dot
        U-tilde-acute
        U-macron-dieresis
        A-circumflex-tilde
        A-breve-acute -grave -hook -tilde
        E-circumflex-tilde

Any comments?

Cheers!