I don't see why you want to do that (advance width = zero) anyway. Can you give us another example?
And IIRC, floating accents usually come centered in (apparently) arbitrary widths (500 units, for example). What's the advantage of setting them to zero-width?

I'm not sure what you're building, but be careful if you're doing anything involving color overlaying of characters -- I once built a zero-width font to create flag icons for an multi-language magazine, to facilitate pasting the icons within a QXP text flow. Each flag was 3 or 4 characters, with each character a different color of the flag. We tested it for film output on a Scitex RIP with no problem, but when we changed pre-press houses at the last minute, the new place couldn't get them to output as anything but 4-color black squares on their Linotype RIP. They had to do some sort of mystery trapping magic (that I was not privy to) to fool the machine.

It makes sense to make them [near-]zero-width because you can then place them -left aligned- on any other character. Sometimes that results badly (like on a dotless-i), but it seems like the best default scheme, no? Unless there's special code somewhere to ignore the metrics and render the accent centered/spanning the middle of the base character? I know keyboards have "deadable" characters that only render out in combinations of base+accent, but I think that's only a keying thing, not encoding.

Patrick, I wonder if kerning pairs (between non-zero-width glyphs) would help.

hhp

Would it be possible to make your dicritics one pixel wide, and kern them -1 pixel with every glyph in the font? I imagine that'd be a breeze with class-based kerning in FL. That's not a very elegant solution, but in effect you'd have zero-width characters.

Nathan, I think that's indeed the best way, assuming giving those characters a certain width even matters...

hhp

> Unless there's special code somewhere to ignore
> the metrics and render the accent centered/
> spanning the middle of the base character?

I guess that those floating accents are only useful
when you use a DTP software, where you can define
custom kerning-pairs?

> I know keyboards have "deadable" characters that
> only render out in combinations of base+accent,
> but I think that's only a keying thing, not
> encoding.

What you mean, 'not encoding'? When I type '

Well, I hope it does work. I'm working on a Thai bitmap face right now, and the diacritics really do need to be zero width. Otherwise it's going to look like a bloody train wreck :-/

Here's to hoping...

> When I type '