Some characters with ‘uncertainty dot’ missing from symbol picker

[stephencblair]

We use the characters with a dot below (e.g. ‘ạ’, ‘Ạ’) to indicate that a letter is not clearly legible in a manuscript or inscription. However, some letters with dots are missing from the symbol picker. I don’t know if they’re in the Alphabetum font and can easily be added to the symbol picker, or if they’re missing from the font altogether, in which case we would probably have to draw them ourselves using the system Peter devised for adding new characters to the font.

In Latin, the following letters with dot below are missing from the symbol picker: c, C, f, F, g, G, p, P, q, Q, and x. (Uppercase X with a dot is already there, presumably because it’s identical to Greek uppercase χ with a dot, = EA8E.)

In Greek, we’re missing only lowercase ξ with dot below (capital Ξ with dot is there, = EA56).

[acholyn]

upcoming documentation in related issue #387

[acholyn]

there is possibly some functionality that already exists that would allow custom characters to be drawn and added

[stephencblair]

Yes, I believe Peter hand-drew the smiley-face symbol included in the symbol picker under ‘extra symbols’ as a test; he said we could use the same function for any symbols we needed to add later. There seems to be some discussion of the process here, in Raquel’s comment. Thanks!

[tcouch]

Hi Stephen, a simpler solution here might be for us to add another button to the text editor to add this dot to characters when needed in the same way as Vincula work now. i.e. by use of a combining character, in this case an overdot. Do you think that would work?

[stephencblair]

Hi Tom, many thanks—that would work perfectly! With the one caveat that the dot in question is an ‘underdot’ (ạ) rather than an overdot.

[tcouch]

How does this affect search (see also vincula)?

[tcouch]

How does it look with characters that use descenders; e.g. p/q