Lars,

thank you for your comments. Let me ask your opinion on the practical
question which was the source of my initial inquiry.

The question is: if you were designing a new[1] LaTeX2e encoding
definition file for some font encoding which contained all Latin
letters and the ring accent, BUT NOT the Aring letter, would you put
the special definition of \DeclareTextCompositeCommand for the
combination "\r A" which is the same as the one present in ot1enc.def,
or you would rather remove it, and let the "\r A" be constructed like
other accented letters? E.g. the cyrillic T2* font encodings contain
the Latin latters and the ring accent, and e.g. t2aenc.def contains
the same \DeclareTextCompositeCommand as in ot1enc.def. Was is the
right thing to do to put this composite command into the encoding
definition files?

This question should be considered having in mind that the default
font family would be Computer Modern, but that it should NOT be
concentrated only on the CM family, but try to "do the best thing" for
other font families which might be used with this font encoding.[2]

Would your answer differ if there was no compatibility issue with CM
font family? i.e. if there were no CM-like fonts for that font
encoding, and only "arbiotrary" font families would be used?

Thank you.

===== start footnotes =====
[1] new, so it would be possible to completely ignore the
backward-compatibility issues (including ones with Plain TeX),
i.e. considering purely the "right thing to do". Obviously, changing
an existing file for a along established and stable font encoding like
OT1 is not an option.

[2] that means that the gap between A and ring in \r{A} will be
smaller than the gap between other accents and other letters. would
THAT be acceptable?
===== end footnotes =====

"LH" == Lars Hellström writes:

[...]
 >> 2) shall the artificial accent placement be applied to other
 >> combinations of capital letters and accents on the level of
 >> encoding definition files?

 LH> ? Please clarify.

you said:

 LH> This might actually be the reason to _make_ it touch the
 LH> A. Recall that accents over capitals are usually quite close to
 LH> the letter (closer than in the case of lower case letters).

i meant that the \accent command places accents using the same "gap"
for uppercase and lowercase letters (is this so?); so i was asking,
are you proposing that commands like \" \' \` shall be redefined to
behave differently if they are applied to capital letters, i.e.use
some trick similar to the one used in the definition of \AA in plain
TeX or \r{A} composite command, to make the gap smaller.

Best,
v.