Adjusting diacritic in italicized combining character?

Question

I'm trying to render an italicized lowercase omega (ω) with an inverted breve ( ̑ ) in a webpage using Times New Roman.

I'm using the combining character approach: ̑ ( ̑ ) and ω (ω) should combine into a single character ̑ω (̑ω). The resulting character looks fine if I copy and paste it into Notepad, but it has a problem on the webpage (or on this very stackexchange page): the inverted breve is too far to the left (see here).

So far, messing around with possible CSS solutions only makes things worse. For example, <em>&#964;<span style="margin-left:-5px">&#785;</span>&#969;&#957;</em> produces this.

Does anyone know how to adjust the location of the inverted breve? Thanks.

Answer 1

By Unicode principles, a combining mark must be appear (in data stream) after the character it is to be attached to, so the correct notation would be ω̑.

Browsers often have difficulties with placing combining marks properly, though modern browsers tend to do it mostly well. Here the issue seems to be with the font. Fonts often have inadequate implementations of combining marks, especially as regards to metric information. You can see this by testing the string, ω̑ in different programs (e.g. MS Word), using different fonts. E.g., in Cambria, the rendering looks OK.

Before considering the choice of a font, or a font-family list, consider whether you really want to have an omega with inverted breve. Such a character does not appear in any form of Greek writing or mathematical notations that I know of. You might actually mean omega with perispomeni, ῶ, which is a normal character in polytonic Greek; it would best be written as a precomposed character, U+1FF6 GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI, using the character reference ῶ if needed. You would naturally need to check that all the fonts in your font-family list contain it, but this is a manageable problem.

Addition: According to the Unicode Standard, clause 7.2, “U+0342 combining greek perispomeni may appear as a circumflex , an inverted breve ̑ , a tilde ̃ , or occasionally a macron ̄ . Because of this variation in form, the perispomeni was encoded distinctly from U+0303 combining tilde.” So it seems that at the character level, the correct diacritic to be used is the perispomeni. The fact that its shape is tilde-like in Times New Roman, as well as in most other fonts, is comparable to other glyphic variation.

Answer 2

This is very different from my first answer. Assuming that you want to use Times New Roman and to have an inverted breve -looking diacritic on omega, I’m afraid you need some kludgery. In principle, the placement of diacritics could be tuned using OpenType features, but Times New Roman does not seem to have anything useful in this department. Neither does it have glyph variants for perispomeni.

The following trickery seems to work when Times New Roman is available (as it almost always is):

<style>
* { font-family: Times New Roman }
.comb { position: relative; }
.comb .invb { position: absolute; left: 0; bottom: 0; }
.eta .invb { left: -0.1em; }
</style>
<p><i>Μαι<span class=comb>ω<span class=invb>&nbsp;&#785;</span></span>τις</i>
<p><i>Ἀθ<span class="comb eta">η<span class=invb>&nbsp;&#785;</span></span>ναι</i>

The trick is to wrap the mark, turned to a spacing mark by writing a no-break space before it, in a span and this in turn, in conjunction with the base character, in an outer span, and use CSS positioning to make the mark overlay the base character.

This works because the omega is roughly the same width as the no-break space. As the second example word shows, the situation is a bit different if you need the inverted breve on the eta letter: you need to shift the mark somewhat to the left.

I first tried with a simpler (and more logical) construct without the no-break space, using the mark as genuinely non-spacing. But this cause the mark to disappear or get positioned wildly.

I recommend using the approach described in my other answer, but if there are compelling reasons to make the diacritic (which is logically perispomeni) look like an inverted breve, then this trickery might be the best shot. Note that it distorts the data, messing up character-level operations like searching and indexing, since the trick means that a word contains a spacing mark.