Alternate Glyphs In Unicode

[Rikker]

Can someone help me figure out how to force alternate glyphs in Unicode? I've read about joiners and non-joiners, but it doesn't do what I want.

What I'm really trying to do is display the consonant ญ by itself without its ฐาน, like you see when it is combined with สระอู, i.e. as in กตัญญู. But I want just the alternate form of the consonant, no vowel.

So far, I can use a non-joiner to force the ฐาน to stay, so that it overlaps with สระอู, as in ญ‌ู. But that's not what I want to do.

How do I force a given glyph? Help!

[ElZorro]

Can someone help me figure out how to force alternate glyphs in Unicode? I've read about joiners and non-joiners, but it doesn't do what I want.

What I'm really trying to do is display the consonant ญ by itself without its ฐาน, like you see when it is combined with สระอู, i.e. as in กตัญญู. But I want just the alternate form of the consonant, no vowel.

So far, I can use a non-joiner to force the ฐาน to stay, so that it overlaps with สระอู, as in ญ‌ู. But that's not what I want to do.

How do I force a given glyph? Help!

Like this?  I'm not sure I understand the question. If you want to type that character, you can use the character map or alt + [character number] (in this case, alt+63247)

Edited March 5, 2008 by ElZorro

[Rikker]

That's what I'm looking for, yeah. I'd forgotten that there are those characters in the Private Area block of Unicode. I would like to know how to do it without using those special characters, though, which won't display in most fonts (Arial Unicode MS is the only one I know of that they do display correctly in).

The reason I ask is that for a given character, there can be more than one form (glyph). Many Thai characters have alternate forms. The form of ไม้เอก in ที่ and ท่า is different, for one, and ไม้หันอากาศ is different between ปัก and กัน in some fonts. Usually you can only get glyphs like  and  by combining them with certain other characters. So I was just wondering how to force these versions on their own using a control character. I was under the impression it is possible, but I don't know how.

Edited March 5, 2008 by Rikker

[Richard W]

How do I force a given glyph? Help!

Essentially, you can't unless it's a CJK character (basically Chinese characters to most of us) or, to a limited extent, Mongolian and mathematical symbols. You can then use a variation selector to get a registered glyph, but it's really intended for Japanese proper nouns, for which a particular glyph may be appropriate, mathematical symbols, where someone may have assigned a difference in meaning to what are usually just free variants, and Mongolian, where the shaping can be word-dependent.

In theory you can 'use markup', but that is application-specific. As you have discovered, for a given font, especially an old one, you may be able to use the PUA, but again that is in practice font dependent. However, I think there is a degree of vendor-specific standardisation for Thai glyphs. For positioned vowels and tone marks you could try the transcoding hints in the MacThai to Unicode conversion tables, but I wouldn't count on them working on a Mac, let alone a Windows machine. It's rather like expecting to find codes for differently positioned acute accents in the Roman script.

Richard.

[Rikker]

Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation, Richard.