I am a linguist and I am trying to use a combing diacritic ‘Combing Minus Sign Below’ (U+0320) in LaTeX and Word; for instance, by typing the letter ‘a’ and the mark one gets ‘a̠’. However, in TeXmacs this character combination is unexpectedly presented linearly:
The font I chose supports the correct visual presentation and therefore it cannot be blamed.
This problem is presumably firstly reported by another user about a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27630505), who correctly ascribes the symptom to the character-rendering mechanism of TeXmacs, yet there seems to be no further feedback. Some of the user’s expressions may be too professional, which I shall illustrate a bit.
The converting mechanism in TeXmacs seems to render certain character sequences into a single character that is visually indistinguishable from that sequence, if the character is pre-assigned a position in Unicode. For example, if one types the letter ‘a’ and a combining diacritic ‘Combining Ring Above’ (U+030A) in LaTeX or Word, one gets the combined sequence ‘å’ (the letter ‘a’ plus ‘Combining Ring Above’) consisting of two symbols; pasting this sequence into TeXmacs, nevertheless, will convert this string into a single letter ‘å’ (U+00E5) pre-existing in Unicode, an output now undecomposable into its previous form. The ‘a̠’ mentioned above, on the other hand, does not have a corresponding single letter in Unicode and thus remains unchanged in TeXmacs, yet the rendering mechanism wrongfully leaves the diacritic following the vowel instead of in situ.
Here are my questions:
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Is there a way of preventing the compulsory conversion of certain string sequences into a single ‘precomposed’ letter in TeXmacs?
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Is there any solution supporting the correct output of combining diacritics?