Time to face the music: arbitrary diacritical marks are not likely to be satisfactory on old browsers (and new ones) that don't listen to vertical-align:whatever and text-indent:whatever or margin-left:whatever. This is strictly an experiment, a workaround that merely suggests the desired result. The marks are:
Narrow, medium, and wide letters will have to be tuned
to the marks differently. The width of "h" is about midway between that
of "i" and "m" in most fonts, and this is the present state of affairs
(not yet very well tempered):
comic sans ms: ^h ~h `h ´h -h –h —h ·h ¨h
symbol:
^h
~h
`h
´h
-h
–h
—h
·h
¨h
arial: ^h ~h `h ´h -h –h —h ·h ¨h
times new roman: ^h ~h `h ´h -h –h —h ·h ¨h
The marks are all from comic sans ms because they are the best ones among these fonts (the alternates, from courier new bold, are not bad, except for \grave, \acute and \ddot). It takes two different horizontal shifts and one vertical shift to do even this well. An example of the first two is <em class=n4 id=e1>`</em>: em (for marks) sets the font, n4 raises the ` four points and e1 moves it one point to the right. Then <a id=w4>h</a> shifts the h underneath the mark.
The workaround is that EW-moves have to be implemented in two different ways because of browser-bugs: