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John Hudson The masora circle is intended primarily for the circle found in fully pointed biblical texts. In such texts it needs to be printed in a row above the vowel points and accents, so perhaps at the same height as the upper dot.
I'm not convinced of this. The height of the masora circle in the SBL Font is based on that used in BHS, which is lower that you suggest, occupying roughly the same vertical space as ole. I have not been able to find anywhere in the BHS text where a masora circle needs to appear above an accent or holam.
The upper punctum, on the other hand, does need to ride above other marks, and one impact of this is that lines containing the puncta may need greater leading, i.e. interlinear spacing, than typical text, both to ensure that the puncta do not clash with marks or descending letters on the line above and to give ample space so that the puncta do not appear to be visually associated with the wrong line. It would be very inefficient if this large linespacing needed to be used throughout fully pointed texts in order to accomodate the masora circle at such a height.
