placement of diacritical wrong

[nfenwick]

NotoSerifRegular.ttf

Font Version

2.01 (from FontViewer on Linux)

Application name and version

In browsers and on ebook readers.

Issue

The two dots under the "a" are all the way over to the next character. This doesn't happen with a different font (such as DejaVu). With other fonts the two dots are under the 'a' where they should be.

The code point for the 'a' with two dots below is "61 CC A4"

Hope this helps.

[simoncozens]

Noto Sans and Noto Serif have different "bottom" anchors for the a: Sans has a centred bottom anchor, which looks like this:

Serif has a bottom anchor on the right hand side of the a (I presume this is for the sake of the cedilla):

Obviously the bottom right anchor is the wrong one for the combining diaeresis below. So there could be multiple fixes here depending on the correctness of a̧:

1. a̧ should have a central cedilla in both cases, and we need to shift the anchor of Serif to the bottom.
2. a̧ should have a right-anchored cedilla in both cases, and we need separate bottom and bottomright anchors in both fonts.
3. a̧ should have a right-anchored cedilla in serif but not in sans, and so serif needs separate bottom and bottomright anchors.
4. something more complicated.

I don't know which is right - I would try asking @moyogo.

[kess]

If possible, I would prefer option 4 – something more complicated, as some orthographies (i.e. user groups) strongly prefer it one way or the other.

I do not have a convenient list of what users of specific language varieties prefer. (I work in a library and is responsible for writing section labels (with Noto) in different languages. More than once have I received strong “opinions” regarding the placement of the cedilla/comma. In my local library setting this usually concerns minority language varieties and hence is seen as both very important and sensitive from the users’ perspective.)

[moyogo]

Depending on the preference, the cedilla can be optically centered on the glyph’s width, on one bowl or on one stem.

It can have its own "cedilla" anchor, but of course, it can use the same anchor as optically centered "bottom" marks when they follow the same preference. However the shape should be adequate, which is not the case in Noto Sans where it doesn’t fully join into a when centered on the width.

Noto Sans, Noto Sans Mono and Noto Serif should follow the same approach for consistency.

@kess Are you able to use stylistics sets, stylistic alternate or character variant features to select which form to use if not the default form?