Unicode combining codepoints (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character)
are special Unicode characters that add diacritics other characters. For
example, putting the combining codepoint U+0340 after the letter 'a' will show
an acute mark above 'a'.

Diacritics like the above one must always be drawn in a position relatively
higher than the highest point of the original character (e.g. 'a'). For example,
because 'A' is taller than 'a', A + U+0340 will produce an acute mark higher
than a + U+0340 does. Internet Explorer, Firefox, GTK+ and KDE/Qt programs under
Linux are good examples of this behavior, but OpenOffice isn't -- it always
draws such combining codepoints at a fixed height (somewhere above 'a' but not
above 'A').

A screenshot showing how badly OpenOffice draws A with U+0340:
http://imagebin.ca/view/6N3kWN.html

A screenshot showing the right drawing (demonstrated by Firefox):
http://imagebin.ca/view/FzlicMRQ.html

As you can see, Firefox draws the diacritic in a much better position than
OpenOffice does.

The font used is the free and open source DejaVu Sans, which can be downloaded from:
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Download

I hope OpenOffice can draw and print such combining codepoints in the same way
as other programs do.

Best Regards,
Yao Ziyuan
http://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/