[Spellyans] <y Y> + diacritical

[Michael Everson]

At 21:24 -0400 2008-06-25, stinney at sas.upenn.edu wrote:


>  Y/y-acute are in ISO-8859-1 ("latin-1") at 0xdd and 0xfd, and the same in
>Unicode.
>
>  They are in Windows CP-1252, ISO Western 2 and 
>ISO-Adobe at the same locations.
>
>  These characters are *not* in the codepage Mac 
>Roman. So, it is true that fonts which *only* 
>support Mac Roman do not provide y-acute.
>
>But how serious is this?  Are there really "TENS OF THOUSANDS" of fonts which
>support only Mac Roman?

Yes. Easy outline font design was first available on the Mac.

>And what is the relative frequency of use of 
>these fonts compared to, say, the common web 
>fonts or the common PDF fonts?

Display fonts (used in titling and signage and 
advertising and book cover design) are very 
commonly used even if many text fonts do not.

>Perhaps the occasional person will occasionally 
>experience the situation that a favourite font 
>does not provide y-acute, but my expectation, at 
>least, would be that this would be extremely 
>uncommon and should not be a deal-breaker in the 
>choice between y-diaresis and y-acute.

I am by no means convinced that y-acute is 
"better" than y-diaeresis in any case. I think 
the dot is nicely evocative of the dot in the <i> 
which will help RMC users who see <dëdh> think of 
it as an [i:] sound.

Moreover, I would like to consider using the 
acute as a mark of anomalous stress in 
dictionaries, in preference to the middle dot 
used in Nance and in Williams.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com