At 14:20 5.12.96, John M. Fiscella wrote:
>Hi Michael:
Hi John. Cc:ing this to two rather large lists because it's an interesting
question and not unrelevant to discussions of casing on those lists
recently.
I hope you don't mind.
>I would be interested if you had an opinion/viewpoint of a specific
>Unicode/ISO 10646 character dilemma: 017f 'latin small letter long s'
OK.
>The problem I am trying to resolve is that in African and Eurasian
>orthographies, a 'long s' is used in some alphabets. But sometimes,
>a 'long s' is interpreted as referring to an 'antique s' .
>The two are designed differently in some typefaces.
Argh. My books on typography don't refer to "antique s". But I think, since
you mention African, there might be a coding answer to your question. Let's
see what you say....
>Both the 'long s' and 'antique s' have descenders in Italic serifed
>designs, but only the 'long s' has a descender in Roman, Book, Regular,
>Plain serifed designs in most families, unless one is designing a 'long
>descender' version or style of an upright typeface, in which case, many
>character glyphs have descenders (such as lower case latin f) that would
>not normally.
Um, don't you mean only the 'antique s' has a descender in plain serifed
designs?
>In sans-serif designs, the 'antique s' is either not defined or identical
>to the lower case latin 's'; but the 'long s' continues to have a descender
>in these designs.
Now I am confused because I thought you were talking about something else.
Maybe it is just a question of terminology.
>ISO 10646 (and Unicode) places the 'long s' in the Latin Extended A block,
>where other characters are defined for African alphabets.
The location isn't so important. And there are other African characters
which are elsewhere (the IPA block for instance).
>Therefore, the *apparent* dilemma is what that code point (017f) really
>means and what was intended by the 10646 authoring body. Was it intended to
>represent an 'antique s' (in which case the principle of non-involvement of
>style was violated) or was it intended to represent a 'long s' (which is a
>separate character -- a lexical variant of lower case 's')?
I think:
0053 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S
0073 LATIN SMALL LETTER S
017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S
The laft character here is the one that looks juft like a fmall letter f
without the crofs bar. In italics it does, juft as the f does, take a long
defcender.
1E60 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH DOT ABOVE
1E61 LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH DOT ABOVE
1E9B LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S WITH DOT ABOVE
These, for your interest, are used in Irish Gaelic when written in the
Gaelic script. (One reasion I take such an interest in your question.)
01A9 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ESH
0283 LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH
The capital letter looks like a GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA. The small
letter looks like a vertical version of an italic letter f with long
descender, or a long s fused to a j, however you prefer to envision it.
Is this an answer to your question?
>Regards,
>John M. Fiscella
>Production First Software
Beft wifhes.
-- Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire (Ireland) Gutháin: +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396 http://www.indigo.ie/egt 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire
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