Re: Version 3.0 and Greek Extended

From: Kamal Mansour (kamal.mansour@monotype.com)
Date: Thu Jul 08 1999 - 19:54:12 EDT


It's always interesting to hear from people that are actually
implementing systems based on a standard such as Unicode.
Implementation is the test by fire.

Elena raises some good questions. I will do my best to recall the
discussion at one of the Unicode Technical Committee meetings which
touched upon the same questions.

It was agreed upon that grammatically speaking that whenever a
lower-case Greek letter with iota subscript (ypogrammeni) became
capitalized, it changed into the upper-case form of the same letter
plus an iota adscript (prosgegrammeni). It was also clear that there
were different schools of thought on how to represent such
combinations of capital letter + iota adscript. Briefly, there are
three schools of thought, each of which preferring one of the
following graphic represetations:

    a. capital letter + subscript iota
    b. capital letter + full-size adscript iota
    c. capital letter + small-size adscript iota

Intuitively, I'm inclined to say that the majority of scholars
prefer form b. (I recognize that there are different opinions on
this question). In any case, by recognizing & maintaining that iota
subscript and iota adscript are two distinct entities, the Unicode
standard accommodates all three schools of thought. In a font
implementation, the subscript iota will typically take the form of a
reduced iota below the baseline. The adscript iota, however, can be
implemented as any one of the three graphic forms listed above. In
fact, technology permitting (e.g. OpenType font), a font can support
all three forms as user-selectable alternatives.

To the best of my knowledge, the Unicode 3.0 charts for Extended
Greek will depict form c.

Regarding the abscence of capital Rho+psili, someone else will have
to answer that question.

Kamal Mansour
Monotype Typography Inc.
Kamal.Mansour@monotype.com

> Dear friends,
> I'm new to this list and I would like to get some explanations about
> the Unicode beta Version 3.0 and its features. First of all I work in a
> publisher house and I'm dealing with a revised edition of an Ancient
> Greek-Italian dictionary for scholars. I'm very much grateful to Unicode
> Consortium efforts and TEI initiative that have allowed me to classify in
a
> univocal way almost all the different characters of Ancient Greek and most
> of the signs used by ethymologists to describe Indoeuropean derived
> languages (by now I can reckon more than 600 different kinds of
characters
> through the whole dictionary). Since my classification job is still in
> progress, I am interested in getting more information about some
revisions
> which have been announced in the Unicode web page dedicated to Version 3.0
> (/Unicode3.0beta.html), especially the revision of capital letters with
> iota
> adscript and whatever referres to Extended Greek set in general. How the
> changes will affect also the Unicode compliant fonts design? E.g., will
> iota prosgegrammeni be still illustrated as subscript in capital letters?
> Is
> there any specific reason for not including precomposed GREEK CAPITAL
> LETTER
> RHO WITH PSILI?
> These are just a couple of questions. I will be glad to exchange ideas
> particularly with those who are engaged in ancient Greek character set
> definition and description or those who have similar experience in
> editorial
> field.
> Thank you
>
> Elena de Leo



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