Ask to Vincent Connare who have created the "MS CD Standards"!!!

They are quite useful in some cases.

They are generally pretty reliable, especially when dealing with general rules such as whether mathematical operators should be slanted in italic fonts.

Most of the information about diacritics is okay, but there are some omissions and imprecisions. For example:

When discussing under comma accents and cedillas, the MS design standards say that 'An under comma is an acceptable alternative to a connecting cedilla for the following characters...', and goes on to list C/c cedilla and the misnames Unicode characters K/k L/l N/n and R/r with cedilla. This gives the wrong impression. The choice of whether a cedilla connects to C/c is a design option, and is also culturally important as the MS design standard notes. However, the correct form for the other letters is not optional: these should all be the under comma accent form not the cedilla.

Note that there are no languages currently using T/t with cedilla, so a single T/t with under comma glyph can be double mapped for both the T/t weith cedilla and with under comma Unicode characters.

In the section on the caron accent, the MS design standards correctly note that the Slovak D/d and T/t with caron take different forms in upper- and lowercase. The uppercase form takes the typical, inverted circumflex form, but the lowercase takes the apostrophe form. However, the MS design standard omits the L/l with caron, also used in Slovak, in which both upper- and lowercase take the apostrophe form.

Very good information, thanks. I guess i�ll rely on them with an eye over some fine work.

Very good information, thanks. I guess i�ll rely on them with an eye over some fine work.

Names for diacritics or 'glyphs' were taken from PostScript or Unicode descriptions and are not character codes or technical names just descriptions. Many human readable names such as PostScript are not 'correct' see the French quotes which are a 'guillemet' in French and 'guillemot' in PostScript, or a Duck.

I've given pointers in the overview for the Unicode and PostScript 'glyph' code or names.

Names can be tricky, at Microsoft the word 'character' is never used to mean 'glyph' it means 'character code' and not 'letter' or 'glyph'. You type a 'character' you get a 'glyph'.

Names are not always universal, see the ntilde, it's not considered correct.

Off-topic:
Vince, just a note -- guillemots are not ducks. They are seabirds and members of the Alcid family, which includes murres, auklets, and puffins.

-- K.

I think the birds were named since they have duck like feets... as the guillemets are sometimes called.

'These quotation marks commonly called 'French quotes' or 'duck's feet' are said to have been named after a French typecutter Guillaume (William) Le B�. Guillemets is the French word for quotation marks. The similarly named Guillemot is a narrow billed, sea auk with duck like feet found in cold northern regions of the world.'

that's what I wrote in the MS Char spec. vinnie