Accents and eBooks

By and large, the English language doesn't use diacritical marks. Even our loanwords are stripped of them; we drink in a cafe rather than the more pretentious café. This has a consequence for HTML and, by extension, eBooks.

As a quick primer, modern computing gives us two main ways of displaying a letter with an accent. The first is simple - encode every single accented letter as a separate "pre-composed" character. So è (U+00E8), é (U+00E0), ê (U+00EA, and ë (U+00EB) are all stored as different codepoints.

But this seems a little inefficient and can make it hard to search through text for an exact lexical match.

So there is a second way to add accents. You take the base character - e (U+0065) - and then apply a separate "combining" accent character to it. For example the combining accent ◌́ (U+0301). That means you can add an accent to áńý ĺét́t́éŕ!́

Note, the accent ◌́ (U+0301) is separate from the character ´ (U+00B4). In fact, most accents have a pre-composed, combining, and separate form. This, understandably, causes much confusion!

Here's a good example. I was reading the excellent Fallen Idols, when I noticed this typesetting bug.

It's always hard to transliterate languages. The Victory Arch in Iraq is known as قوس النصر, and usually written in English as the "Swords of Qādisīyah".

Examining the HTML code in the eBook, it was obvious that the publishers had used a macron ¯ (U+00AF) rather than the combining version ◌̄ (U+0304).

I've reported it to the publisher. I've no idea if they'll fix it in a subsequent re-issue.