[9772] in Athena Bugs
Spanish character compositions.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Aug 11 18:38:05 1992
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1992 18:37:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
To: medalla@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
What were you trying to do?
I was trying to write a capital ~N, with the ~ sign on top of the N.
in the ez window the character looks fine, but on paper a space is
inserted right after the character, only when it's a capital N~, not
when it's a small n~.
Sure enough. It's a bug! I fixed it and it will go into the next release.
It may be possible to get the fix out somewhere sooner.
What's wrong:
there is no interrogatory sign that goes at the beginning of a
question in Spanish, it's just a regular ? sign that has been
rotated 180 degrees.
There is an (ugly looking) interrogatory sign. Because '?' is used to
ask for help, the upside down interrogatory sign is '!?' (computerese
for "not question mark"). What you get then is the ugly overstrike of a
letter c with a superscripted letter i drawn above it. This is one of
several UGLY character compositions we have.
When I print the i with an accent, it comes out not looking good on
paper. The dot on the i is right beside the accent, when there should
only be either the accent or the dot. Something else, the exclamatory
sign that goes at the beginning of a sentence, in Spanish, looks nasty
too, the one regularly used looks nice, kind of like an inverted drop
of water, while the special one that goes at the beginning is bigger and
is just a line.
Yup, these are two more. The troff printing back end doesn't give us a
letter i without the dot. Nobody has spent the requisite dozens of
hours to try and teach troff how to turn a question mark, or an
exclamation point upside down so we make do with these uglies.
-wdc
