The use of explicit tonic accent over-strike is becoming more common in Cyrillic to disambiguate words and as a teaching aid.
Curl currently has {underline } and {line-through}.
A text format for a configurable {double-strike } or {over-strike } would permit placement of a major or minor accent over a character in a visual TextPart.
If configurable, the feature could be toggled for a given TextDisplay, page or reading level or exercise.
For phonetic transliterations, underline remains as common as bold emphasis (in Russian, the tonic accent is more significant than in English and alters vowel values before and after.)
For English language instruction, the classic example is: "Tomorrow the band will record a new record." with the accent changing syllable from verb to noun.
Here are a couple of related en.wikipedia.org links for the usse of the macron and other related UNICODE issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_diacritical_mark
Bert
re: MACRON \u00AF or \u203e versus \u00B4 or ´
I may take a look at a macro for macron display as I want the tonic accents in Russian to be user selectable as either a page option or a clickable per word option.
Some time ago I had asked whether we could consider adding the middle-dot ( · \u00B7 ) of Latin much as we now have trademark and copyright because of a related text display effort.
At the moment {italic } makes the content all italic; these formatting macros would make the feature visible if specified and otherwise no change to the text visual.
I may yet take a different approach altogether as all the words affected come from a dictionary file and phonemic alternative text presentation is also a desired feature (text items flippable from Cyrillic to learner-language phonemic.)
Robert
The other text format issue that I encounter is locale specific dialog quotation: not even all European languages use our identical upper dbl-quotes fore and aft (and a lot of Russian text just indents up front with ' -- '.)
I like {qt } as a macro and would be pleased to see it in Curl 8.0 if files could capture intended locale as metadata.
Anyone interested in related text issues might like to look at this Pango and related link which I have found useful on the Gnu/Linux side.
