Recently, in one of my International Computing lectures, I was demonstrating the use of the Unicode Combining Diacritical Marks. I was using Latin letters as my base character and combining various combinations of diacritcs. As was expected they worked fine.
Then an idea occurred to me. I wondered if the diacritics would combine appropriately with Chinese characters. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that with TextEdit on Mac OSX they combined rather well. Later I tried with various Word Processors and the results of combining were either poor or non-existant.
The next step was to try it with web pages. Combining did not work at all with the browsers I tried. I then used html5 Ruby Annotation and that works quite well, as below.
The Combining Diacritical Marks I have used for the annotation are:-
- U+0316 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT BELOW
- U+0317 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT BELOW
- U+032C COMBINING CARON BELOW
- U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW
