Markus Kuhn wrote:
>
> Frank da Cruz wrote on 1998-10-09 22:16 UTC:
> >
> > I appreciate that these characters are, in one sense, the same as the
> > ones already in the Latin-1 section of Unicode.
>
> Isn't it possible (and in fact most probable), that the poor designer of
> this SNI font just had no clue about that these ordinal indicators are
> usually superscripted, and therefore by accident included too large
> glyphs of what really is the same character?
>
This is indeed the question. But Siemens Nixdorf is one of the last
companies I would ever accuse of poor or sloppy design. How many other
terminals do you know about that implement ISO 2022 properly and allow
switching among all of the Latin alphabets (except Hebrew and Arabic)?
However, like practically every other company on earth that invents private
character sets (with the notable exceptions of Apple and IBM), they do not
document them except by printing a table. The characters are accompanied by
neither names nor descriptions, nor codes (like IBM's GCGID)to identify them
and thus distinguish them from other characters with similar appearance.
> I am fairly familiar with the mathematical notation, and there is
> certainly no commonly used mathematical symbol pair "small letter a with
> underbar" and "small letter o with underbar".
>
Of course I am curious about this too. I notice that Unicode has Capital
and Small Letter B with underbar (at U+1E06,1E07). Ditto for L (1E3A,
1E3B), N (1E48,1E49), R (1E5E,1E5F), T (1E6E,1E6F), Z (1E94,1E95), as well
as small h (1E96). And there is a small letter d with stroke and underbar
at U_20AB (the Vietnamese Dong sign). But no A or O.
Obviously, if there is no purpose or need for these characters, they should
not be encoded in the Universal Character Set. Incidently, the SNI glyph
for "lowercase a with underbar" is quite unmistakenly as described. But the
glyph that some of us are presuming to be "lowercase o with underbar" does
not look so much like a letter "O" to me as a perfectly round circle. In
all the SNI character sets, the letter O is always oblate (and the digit
zero is always shown with a dot in the center), so maybe this is not a
letter O after all (nor a zero). Maybe it's a circle, like the one at
U+25CB, but with an underbar.
I am trying to get clarification from SNI.
- Frank
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