A recent challenge was to post a double-width diacritic for Old Church Slavonic i͡e in HTML. This involves inserting a double-width combining diacritic character from Unicode and making sure it covers the i and e.
Note: A combining diacritic refers to a diacritic or accent character which is combined with another character. For example U+0304 is called the “COMBINING MACRON” and can be used to place a dash over any character (like Russian L, л, as in л̄).
Single vs. Double Width Diacritic Entity Codes
For a single width diacritic like x̄ (x-bar) or p̂ (p-hat), you can put the numeric escape code for the combining diacritic. AFTER the base character (e.g. x̄ for x̄).
For double-width diacritics, it’s different. In this case you have to put the escape code BETWEEN the two base letters. This the HTML sequence for i͡e is actually i͡e . If you put the diacritic code after the “ie” characters you get this – ie͡ – with the diacritic half hanging in the air.
Example Code and Results
View the Code
i͡e
= i͡e
ie͡
= ie͡
Typing Character with the Mac Hex Keyboard
The Mac Hex keyboard allows you to manually enter any Unicode character by it’s code point value. To input i͡e you would activate the keyboard then type I Option+0361 E. It looks a little odd, but it does work.
Other Combining Diacritics
See the Unicode Charts page for a complete list. There are a lots for multiple scripts including math symbols.
