Danish glyphs ǿ and Ǿ

[JimEBlevins]

Something is rotten in the state of Danish characters!

The Danish glyphs ǿ and Ǿ are

• correct in Libre Office's Libre Writer,
• weird in LaTeX, and
• missing in MS Word.

"Weirdness" in LaTeX: The unicode glyphs ǿ and Ǿ appear correctly in LaTeX if I use Source Serif elsewhere in the document with the explicit LaTeX constructions \'\o and \'\O; otherwise, the unicode characters appear as "tofu".

MS Word converts them to Cambria and does not allow me to convert them to Source Serif.

(Given the errors with Word, I do not give details of my LaTeX set-up.)

These two glyphs are very rarely used in Danish, according to Wikipedia.

[frankrolf]

ǿ is not supported in Source Serif, likewise, ǽ and ǻ are not.

As far as I am aware, these characters are used to transliterate Swedish into Danish only, therefore they are not part of AL-4, which is the current supported character set. Do you have a specific use case?

[JimEBlevins]

Hi Frank,

FYI: This very rare glyph is supported by Source Sans and Source Code.

The weird behavior with Word and LaTeX may suggest an issue worth attention.

Ǿ, English Wikipedia

"Ǿ (Ø with an acute accent, Unicode U+01FE) may be used in Danish on rare occasions to distinguish its use from a similar word with Ø. Example: hunden gǿr, "the dog barks" against hunden gør (det), "the dog does (it)". This distinction is not mandatory and the first example can be written gǿr or gør, the first variant (with ǿ) would only be used to avoid confusion. The second example cannot be spelled gǿr. In Danish, hunden gør, "the dog barks", may sometimes be replaced by the non-standard spelling hunden gøer. This is, however, usually based on a misunderstanding of the grammatic rules of conjugation of verbs ending in the letters ø and å. These idiosyncratic spellings are not accepted in the official language standard. On Danish keyboards and typewriters, the acute accent may be typed above any vowel, by pressing the acute key before pressing the letter, but Ǿ is not implemented in the Microsoft Windows keyboard layout for Danish."

[frankrolf]

Thanks for further clarification! I will consider these glyphs for a future revision.

In the meantime, you can emphasize your ø by using the combing acute (U+0301):

[moyogo]

Note that according to the official Danish spelling rules:

Man kan sætte accenttegn i tilfælde hvor ord, ordformer eller sætninger i den givne sammenhæng ellers ville kunne forveksles med andre ord, ordformer eller sætninger, eller hvor en accent i øvrigt vil kunne lette læsningen
[...]
Det anbefales dog at være tilbageholdende med at bruge accent i sådanne tilfælde, og accenttegn over Å/å bør helt undgås. Ofte kan man i stedet markere en fremhævelse ved understregning, ved kursivering eller ved at bruge fed skrift.

Which translates to:

You can put accent marks in cases where words, word forms or sentences in the given context could otherwise be confused with other words, word forms or sentences, or where an accent would otherwise facilitate reading
[...]
However, it is recommended to refrain from using accent in such cases, and accent marks above Å/å should be avoided altogether. Often, you can instead mark an emphasis by underlining, by italicizing or by using bold text.

Of course this doesn’t mean people will not use Ǻ/ǻ or Ǿ/ǿ, they may very well choose to do so.

[JimEBlevins]

Thanks, Frank and moyogo, for the gracious and informative responses about a curiosity of trifling importance.