After looking at tx2378's problem ("bad display of utf8 code u00ed
letter i-accute in times new roman" in p.programming) and becoming
increasingly confused by what POV-Ray is doing, I rendered a suite of
Latin-1 accented characters with various fonts.  The results are
bafflingly inconsistent:

Times New Roman, Arial, Liberation Serif
  Lowercase 'i' diacritical marks are shifted right and clipped.
  The ring above capital 'A' is incomplete at the bottom; the ring is
  complete when rendered by a word processor, so the gap is not part of
  the font definitions.
Calibri
  All diacritical marks are aligned with their letter, but upper and
  lowercase 'I's with diacriticals are kerned badly.
Cambria
  Lowercase 'i' acute is rendered properly; the other lowercase 'i'
  diacritical marks are shifted right and clipped.
Georgia
  For all lowercase 'a's except 'a' acute, lowercase 'e' grave, and all
  uppercase 'I's, the diacritical marks are shifted right and clipped.
Abhaya Libre (thanks, Bill!), DejaVu Serif
  All the diacritical marks are aligned properly.

Keep staring at the attachment; I may have missed some anomalies.  It's
all so capricious.

Note that my Liberation font may not be the latest version; there was a
licensing dispute a few years ago, resulting in updated fonts not being
bundled with GNU/Linux distros.  I also have not updated my Arial,
Georgia, and Times New Roman since Microsoft withdrew the free
downloads.  They are certainly up-to-date on my Windows partition, but
between UEFI and Win11 encryption, accessing that partition is a PITA
that I have not been moved to subject myself to in quite a while.

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Preview of image 'i-diacrits-montage.png'

Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

Thanks for looking into this, it bothered me too, but it wasn't something that I
was prepared to invest a whole lot of time investigating.

> The results are bafflingly inconsistent:

Yes, I think someone is going to have to sift through some of the source to see
what's going on.

I do recall clipka saying that POV-Ray takes the font files and makes prisms
from them - so maybe something gets messed up in that process, or there's some
fork in the process when the algorithm encounters something in the code that it
doesn't like, and POV-Ray somehow sorta does its own thing.

I wonder if a font editor or hex editor would reveal any attributes/properties
that are common denominators among the borked character glyph definitions.

Otherwise, I don't really see how it can be any different than the WYSIWYG word
processor result.

(I _have_ actually wanted to see if it were possible to read a font file with
POV-Ray and export a standalone prism include...)


> accessing that partition is a PITA
> that I have not been moved to subject myself to in quite a while.


Yeah - I tried to do that once so that I didn't have to make copies of all my
fonts, and just access them directly on the Windows partition, but I was never
successful.  Maybe I'll try again on the next machine.

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Le 22/01/2023 à 21:38, Bald Eagle a écrit :
> Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for looking into this, it bothered me too, but it wasn't something that I
> was prepared to invest a whole lot of time investigating.
> 
>> The results are bafflingly inconsistent:
> 
> Yes, I think someone is going to have to sift through some of the source to see
> what's going on.
> 
> I do recall clipka saying that POV-Ray takes the font files and makes prisms
> from them - so maybe something gets messed up in that process, or there's some
> fork in the process when the algorithm encounters something in the code that it
> doesn't like, and POV-Ray somehow sorta does its own thing.
> 
> I wonder if a font editor or hex editor would reveal any attributes/properties
> that are common denominators among the borked character glyph definitions.
> 

I would recommend looking at the font files in FontForge (also available 
in Linux)


> Otherwise, I don't really see how it can be any different than the WYSIWYG word
> processor result.
> 

IIRC, font files can have various descriptions (Mac vs non Mac...) 
usually both, but they might diverge. Also the kerning informations 
might be tricky.

Any share of the font files from initial post ?

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[somewhat off-topic. Running Windows 10, with latest update of Firefox]

While writing a recent post to the newsgroups-- using the official web portal
like I'm using now--I happened to include the word 'expose', but with the final
'e' having an accent mark. In the Windows Character Map app (for the Calibri
font), that specific e is "U+00E9 Latin Small Letter E With Acute" and the
keystroke to create it is Alt+0233.

When I went back to view my own post later, any full line of text with that
word/letter in it was completely missing; just a blank line there.

I rarely if ever use such special text characters, so this was an unwelcome
surprise.

Doing another test, I've discovered that the web-portal 'editor' for writing
posts is where the problem lies-- it wipes out the sentence before sending it,
when the "Preview Message" button is pressed.

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"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> [somewhat off-topic. Running Windows 10, with latest update of Firefox]
>
> While writing a recent post to the newsgroups-- using the official web portal
> like I'm using now--I happened to include the word 'expose', but with the final
> 'e' having an accent mark. In the Windows Character Map app (for the Calibri
> font), that specific e is "U+00E9 Latin Small Letter E With Acute" and the
> keystroke to create it is Alt+0233.
>
> When I went back to view my own post later, any full line of text with that
> word/letter in it was completely missing; just a blank line there.
>
> I rarely if ever use such special text characters, so this was an unwelcome
> surprise.
>
> Doing another test, I've discovered that the web-portal 'editor' for writing
> posts is where the problem lies-- it wipes out the sentence before sending it,
> when the "Preview Message" button is pressed.

I think that this issue has been touched on before.

The line may either still be there, and only visible in the newsreader (like
Thunderbird), or you have to post it with a newsreader, and then it works.

Searching for threads in these forums is nearly impossible.   I haven't yet
acquired sufficient search engine fu to ever find what I know exists.

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> > [somewhat off-topic. Running Windows 10, with latest update of Firefox]
> >
> > While writing a recent post to the newsgroups-- using the official web portal
> > like I'm using now--I happened to include the word 'expose', but with the final
> > 'e' having an accent mark. In the Windows Character Map app (for the Calibri
> > font), that specific e is "U+00E9 Latin Small Letter E With Acute" and the
> > keystroke to create it is Alt+0233.
> >
> > When I went back to view my own post later, any full line of text with that
> > word/letter in it was completely missing; just a blank line there.
> >
> > I rarely if ever use such special text characters, so this was an unwelcome
> > surprise.
> >
> > Doing another test, I've discovered that the web-portal 'editor' for writing
> > posts is where the problem lies-- it wipes out the sentence before sending it,
> > when the "Preview Message" button is pressed.
>
> I think that this issue has been touched on before.
>
> The line may either still be there, and only visible in the newsreader (like
> Thunderbird), or you have to post it with a newsreader, and then it works.
>
> Searching for threads in these forums is nearly impossible.   I haven't yet
> acquired sufficient search engine fu to ever find what I know exists.

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>
 (sorry, I hit the 'send message' button too early by mistake)
> >
> > Doing another test, I've discovered that the web-portal 'editor' for writing
> > posts is where the problem lies-- it wipes out the sentence before sending it,
> > when the "Preview Message" button is pressed.
>
> The line may either still be there, and only visible in the newsreader (like
> Thunderbird), or you have to post it with a newsreader, and then it works.
>

I was wondering the same thing. I would imagine that I would have to use a
newsreader to *send* it, since the line disappears on my end before it's
actually sent.

A test:
The following sentence has a special character in one of the words. If you can
see it in Thunderbird, that would be useful to know. I will not see it using the
web portal, once it is posted:

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Le 2023-01-30 à 20:17, Kenneth a écrit :
> "Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
>> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>>
>   (sorry, I hit the 'send message' button too early by mistake)
>>>
>>> Doing another test, I've discovered that the web-portal 'editor' for writing
>>> posts is where the problem lies-- it wipes out the sentence before sending it,
>>> when the "Preview Message" button is pressed.
>>
>> The line may either still be there, and only visible in the newsreader (like
>> Thunderbird), or you have to post it with a newsreader, and then it works.
>>
> 
> I was wondering the same thing. I would imagine that I would have to use a
> newsreader to *send* it, since the line disappears on my end before it's
> actually sent.
> 
> A test:
> The following sentence has a special character in one of the words. If you can
> see it in Thunderbird, that would be useful to know. I will not see it using the
> web portal, once it is posted:
> 
> This sentence uses the word exposé.
> 
> 
> 
Everything show up correctly. Viewed in Thunderbird.

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Alain Martel <kua### [at] videotronca> wrote:
> >
> > A test:
> > The following sentence has a special character in one of the words...
> >


> >
> Everything show up correctly. Viewed in Thunderbird.

Thanks! It seems that the problem is only with the newsgroups' web-portal and
message editor.

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On 1/22/23 11:57, Cousin Ricky wrote:
> After looking at tx2378's problem ("bad display of utf8 code u00ed
> letter i-accute in times new roman" in p.programming) and becoming
> increasingly confused by what POV-Ray is doing, I rendered a suite of
> Latin-1 accented characters with various fonts.  The results are
> bafflingly inconsistent:

In a thread about povr/v4.0's cmap{} code changes, Bald Eagle asked me 
if I'd dug into this issue. I'd not - though I had some guesses as to 
what might be wrong.

Well, I'm going to take a run at this issue. Due cmap{} I got some light 
exposure to several unix/linux font utilities. Plus I'll be busy with 
real life over the next couple months and this work the right sort to 
fit here and there as time allows.

I created a test case(a) to see if I could turn up some similar issues 
with linux Ubuntu shipped fonts. The first I tried in FreeMono.ttf fails 
wonderfully! Plenty of issues when Rendered in POV-Ray(povr). :-)

Aside: I can see already there are two tables in the working DejaVuSans 
not in the FreeMono. I have no idea at the moment if that affects anything.

Bill P.

(a) - Yep. The acute lower case i (í) was wrong.

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