Re: Ligatures

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Yuri Khan <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 19 May 2020 17:17:25 +0700
> Cc: Joost Kremers <address@hidden>,
>  Emacs developers <address@hidden>
> 
> An example of character combining other than side-by-side stacking is
> much closer than that: Combining diacritics. Sure, you can delete an
> acute accent from á by pressing Backspace, but you cannot put point
> between the ‘a’ and the accent if you want to put a different
> diacritic between them.

Well, you can (this is Emacs, right?): just disable automatic
composition with "M-x auto-composition-mode", and you can do any
editing you want.  Then re-enable the mode again.

> (And putting multiple diacritics over a single base character in
> various orders is a thing, it is the subject of the Unicode
> Canonical Order subsection in Unicode standard.)

Canonical order of diacritics is indeed important for jobs such as
comparison, searching, etc.  But we are talking about display, and for
display there's a requirement that the order should not matter as long
as the base character comes first.  AFAIR, HarfBuzz supports that
requirement, but not every other shaping engine does.