[1 mod] Diacritical: 'ĥ' circumflex placement not above stem centreline (U+0125)

[Petrus Adamus]

Rendered in 18pt Regular

Sample Glyphs:

ĥ

Description:

The character would be much prettier, if the circumflex would stay exactly in the middle over the stem of "h", so a bit more to the left (like ex. in DejaVu Sans).

UA String:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; eo; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100922 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.10

[Petrus Adamus (dohnp5a1)]

Automatic Screenshot

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Please can you attach a screenshot showing the rendering on your exact system. The attached screenshot is blank and has no characters rendered.

[David Marshall (dave-daltonmaag)]

The positioning of the circumflex over an h is debatable. Some fonts
place it over the ascending stem, some place it over the shoulder at
non-ascending accent height, and some place it centred over the whole
character.

None of these is "correct", none of these is "wrong", but none of these
is a truly satisfactory design decision - it's a clumsy character no
matter what you do.

Dave

[Petrus Adamus (dohnp5a1)]

Yes, the character is really clumsy, despite of that, the solution of the circumflex centered over the ascending stem is the best one in my opinion. See for instance the typeface "Fertigo", eventually serif "Warnock" or "Minion" by Adobe.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Given that just such a solution (centreing about the stem) is used for Ĵ (J circumflex), I don't see why it wouldn't work for ĥ. See attached PDF for comparision.

[Petrus Adamus (dohnp5a1)]

There is also a problem with the height of the char: probably the highest one from Latin-A – if there is the character "y" in the upper line, they are nearly touching one the other, which is really unsightly.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Petr: you will always get potential near-misses between descenders on one line and ascenders on the line below, it happens fairly infrequently (statistically low chance). The degree to which those near misses are visible depends on the leading (line-spacing), and quite often people typeset with this in mind eg. "12pt/14pt" (12pt text with 14pt spacing).

Thank you for the SVG too, this seems to confirm (see the "h-circumflex.pdf" attachment too) that the centreing above the stem seems to work for the placement of the circumflex.