the problem is how to have a “backslashed R”, looking at here and picking up Combining Diacritical Marks you can see all the unicode combining diacritical marks like the one to have a “slashed R” that is U+0338, so if you type R and ctrl>shift>U 0338 >return you obtain R̸,
but if you want a “backslashed R” and you type R and ctrl>shift>U 20e5 >return you obtain R⃥, and it isn’t what you want
to do this you can use also gucharmap or kcharselect, I tried and them work for U+0338 and doesn’t work for U+20e5, so, thinking that it was a gucharmap problem I mailed to gnomebugs here , I red this too here:
and installed fonts, Arial Unicode MS and Caslon, that seems to support U+20D0 – U+20FF (my is U+20e5, so it should be in the range) Combining Diacritical Mark, but it doesn’t work, and at the end him suggest me to ask help to my “distrution’s support forums”, so here I am ;), Why I cannot have a “backslashed R”???
You hinted allready somewhere else having this problem, so I looked allready a bit into it. Though I do not have the ultimate solution.
Now with characters there are allways three things to contemplate:
are they stored correctly on the system;
are they displayed properly;
how to get them into the file.
As you have your method to generate Unicode, I will not venture into 3).
But you could check if the file where these characters are in, contain the correct UTF-8 encoded bytes. I think that will be OK because the R̸ is displayed properly and thus stored properly and I assume that the other one is also stored properly.
That brings us to 2). Your example contains two characters: COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY from the Combining Diacritical Marks set and COMBINING REVERSE SOLIDUS OVERLAY from the Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols set. It could be that R is not seen as a symbol here, but I doubt that.
A conclusion here could be that displaying from the Combining Diacritical Marks is OK, but from the Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols is not.
FF does the same BTW. I specialy tested because in another case I had Kongueror doing combining correct where FF failed. IMHO this is somewhere due to the font used in combination with the software that interpretes this. The font should contain codes that say to combine and how and the software should do it. I can not tell which one is wrong here.
Also having the correct UTF-8 encoded Unicode combinations (with R) in a simple text file (done editing octal) show one correct and one wrong in a konsole terminal.
In short, I think you method of entering is correct, They are correct in the file. Displaying them goes wrong.
I am not quite sure where it exactly is. My earlier experience here is with Devanāgarī, and with the Latin Extended Additional characters. I found a font for the latter, but when it was used, the combining of the first went wrong for some of the Devanāgarī combinations in the same font.
Thus I had either Devanāgarī correct and no Latin Extended additional (which is used to transscribe Devanāgarī in Latin), or I had the Latin characters with dots below and horizontal lines above, but no correct Devanāgarī.
I also had problems to get the applics (e.g. FF) to use the font I wanted.
I also have the idea that when a font is used by an applic and the character asked for is not in the font, it falls back to an alternative. In your case I can imagine that when the combining back slash is not in the font used, it simply uses the normal back slash.
I am afraid that it is such a combintation of problems (errors in fonts, not using the correct font by the app, fall-back) that bothers us here.
You could try OpenOffice to see if you can get the correct working combination of font and charcter by using the Insert > Special charater from the menu. I tried this yesterday and I found some fonts having some of the characters of the Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols set, but none with the . You have other fonts installed, imho they should be available in OOo.
