Lithuanian idotaccentacute

Just came across this locl feature code:

script latn;
language LTH ;
sub iacute by dottediacute;

It is designed as a regular lower case i (with the dot) and an acute accent above. Is this an actual part of Lithuanian ortography, and should it be taken into consideration when making typefaces?

It’s not part of their basic alphabet, but Michael Everson says it is used in Lithuanian dialectology.
lithuanian.pdf (62.8 KB)

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See here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36.625&rep=rep1&type=pdf

“The Lithuanian letter “i” is always written with a dot above. All accented forms of “i” should also be dotted.”

I once had this explained to me by a Lithuanian who wanted it accounted for in a font. I think the solution may have been simply to have an anchor over dotted i. Also, if you have a ccmp feature that substitutes dotlessi for i before a combining mark, it should be disabled for Lithuanian.

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I recommend iacute.loclLTH as glyph name, and this glyph generation recipe:
idotless+dotaccentcomb+acutecomb=iacute.loclLTH .

For mark-to-base and mark-to-mark, you have two options:

  1. You could manually add this line to the locl feature code for language LTH;: sub idotless' @CombiningTopAccents by i;
  2. If you want to keep locl automated, generate the following recipe: idotless+dotaccent=idotless.loclLTH and update the features.

Technically, the latter is a little hack, glyphnamewise. The first option is a little cleaner in that respect. But both should work just fine.

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@George_Thomas Thanks for that!

@psb6m Thank you, I’ll keep that in mind.

@mekkablue That sounds doable, thanks! Maybe the first solution could be automatically generated by Glyphs when i, idotless, and any combining accents are present within the font?

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We’ll think about it. Want to double check first though. Perhaps other languages are involved as well.

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Glad to hear it!

Technically, the non ambiguous way to have the dotted i with an acute is to have i + combining dot + combining acute: i̇́ <0069 0307 0301>.
See https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/ch07.pdf#G15992