stevenrowat wrote:
They actually seem to have used the vertical center rather than the baseline (if you look at my screenshot), but your point is taken. Fair enough. I have no idea what the solidus overstrike was designed for. I wish someone had designed it to do my job, but apparently they didn't.
The solidus is supposed to form new characters. So the type designer has carefully matched the solidus to the character so the whole looks good. If the solidus were on the baseline, it would stick out at the top on the "g" and not cross the descender. That would look really ugly in isolation.
You may think that the computer is "overstriking" the character, but in fact the combination is stored as a whole and the layout agent knows to replace the character sequence "g"+"U+0337" with the visually combined form.
stevenrowat wrote:
Designing my own font is a bit beyond me (and I don't really want to use a font that has no descenders anyway), so I guess I'll have to give up.
It would seem easier to design another solidus overstrike, that stayed at the baseline for the whole font, no? Or is that what you meant when you said "design your own font"?
Well that suggestion was at least partly in jest. I wouldn't want to try that myself either. But if you did, you wouldn't lose descenders, you would just have to create combined characters for each character in the font. With the proper software this is done in a graphic interface, so it would mainly involve a lot of time-consuming busy work, I think.
stevenrowat wrote:
And, I haven't tried the macro -- you say it overstrikes the dash? Would that be the same as the Nisus strikethrough macro? (ie.: ------------). The Nisus one already does multiple letters...is yours different?
No, it "overstrikes" the solidus, so it would allow you to do what you were doing before--laboriously--in one quick go. If you look inside, you will see that I specified the solidus by number ("0x0337"), so you could replace that number with the number of any other combining form and it would "overstrike" with that.
But here's the thing, I really wonder why you are trying to do things this way. I can understand the desire to reproduce an old document faithfully; I often do the same thing. But I usually do so, so I can do things like search the document. That is I try to reproduce the document
logically. In your case it sounds like this overstriking was form of editing (crossing out?) that was used. I would want to reproduce that with a style, that graphically could be represented with a colour or a (visually separate) strike attribute, or a background color. This would also allow it to be changed easily.
The strikethrough approach completely destroys searchability. If you overstrike "Nisus" with a solidus, the text is logically "N/i/s/u/s/".
The overstrike was a hack back then, dictated by the technical limitations of the time. Is it so important to reproduce the graphical impression that faithfully? If so maybe, you should just scan it, and put it in as a graphic.
Just my two cents worth.