I'm afraid, the process of taking NFD followed by removing \pM
characters
(remove_accent() as below) would remove marks other than accents too
much.
Say, it replaces '≠' (U+2260, <NOT EQUAL TO>) with '=' (<EQUALS SIGN>)
since a mathematic "negation slash" is encoded by U+0338
<COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY> which is to be removed.
Also, although they are not accents, it's unclear (and quite
language-dependent)
what should be done with ligatures.
--
Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this
special
biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen