Using Diacritic Characters.
A Diacritic Character is a mark or symbol which is added to another character in order to change the pronunciation of that character. Examples in European text are accents é and diaeresis (German ö) above, cedilla (Spanish ç) below. Other languages may have diacritic characters placed to the left or right, and some use all four positions.
Some, like Sanskrit derived languages, combine consonants and vowels together to create further characters. This can produce a font of perhaps 500 separate characters, which cannot be served by a standard font of 223 available characters (255-32).
This problem can often be solved by using the principle of overprinting. The German ö being printed by typing 'o' followed by an umlaut, which is designed to overprint the previous character.
When the original character varies in the width (ô, î) then the diacritic character position may need to be adjusted. When Designing a TrueType font Kerning may be used to achieve this, however it does require software that supports Kerning.
If a diacritic is to be used on Upper and Lower case (Ä , ä) there is little alternative to Designing two separate diacritic characters.
Diacritics with Full Left Offset
Diacritic Characters can be created in Font Maker when Designing a Vector or TrueType font by adjusting the Left and Right Margins to create a full Left Offset, or zero horizontal movement. For Example:
In the first illustration the Left and Right Margins are set on either side of the character. The screen or printer will start painting from the Left Margin and, after printing the character, will advance to the Right Margin ready for the next character. The second illustration shows a diacritic character with both the Margins together to the Right, that is full Left Offset. Painting will again start Diacritic Characters at the Left Margin (to the Right) and will paint the character to the Left of that Margin (over the previous character). Then painting will advance to the Right Margin (i.e. NO MOVEMENT).