Sep 1, 2021
Hackiest possible support for rendering Unicode combining characters using GNU Unifont

This is the equivalent of backing up a typewriter by one character and overlaying a second letter on the same space.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Detail of a Qemu window showing a few characters being rendered. Top left: an 'à' created from an 'a' and a U+0300 combining grave accent. Having it right at the corner shows how the accent is almost invisible against the window boundary. Middle column: an 'à' under a regular 'g' showing that the accent is again almost invisible against the descender of the character above. Right column: an 'à' to the right of a regular 'g' looks best of all, though the accent is still too high. Bottom half: a list of devanagari vowel diacritics modifying the same consonant. Looks reasonable except for a couple of cases where lines overlap. This is the best we can do with a single glyph for any accent without getting into glyphs for individual ligatures, since it has to work with a large variety of letter shapes.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.

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