Modest proposal
Apr. 1st, 2010 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ewxkernel.org is currently upside-down. (Screenshot for when they turn it back upright.) The implementation is a bit of a hack, using Unicode characters that resemble the rotated form of the intended Roman letters.
To allow the same effect less hackily, a colleague and I propose a new Unicode code point: COMBINING 15° CLOCKWISE ROTATION.
The effect of this would be that the base character and all combining characters preceding it were rotated about the center of the base character. Of course, you could continue with further combining characters, including further rotations.
The normalization algorithms would of course require updating to cope with the unusual properties of this new combining character. At the moment if you have two combiners of different classes they can be re-ordered without any visible change, but this would no longer be the case.
As an optimization, additional rotations could be included, for instance 15° anticlockwise or 90° clockwise. Obviously there would need to be associated canonicalization rules.