Perhaps the characters you seek are in Spacing Modifiers. If not, you might try
looking in some other blocks. It is often the case that characters, for
historical reasons, are allocated in different blocks than one might expect. I
will cc the Unicode distribution list in case someone there can add more
information.
[Although not in your particular situation, in many cases characters not
explicitly in the code charts are to be encoded using a combination of base
characters and combining marks. For example, a c with a ring over it would be
encoded with a 'c' followed by U+030A.]
If the characters are not in Unicode, then you can propose that they be added.
Because of the need for synchronization with ISO 10646, this process can take
several years.
In the meantime, you can use values in the private use area (U+E000 to U+F8FF)
to represent characters that you need, use commercially available font editing
programs to construct the appropriate fonts, and then exchange them within your
user community.
You ask whether "the Latin Extended Additional Code Chart be standard with
Microsoft's Windows 2000 OS". I don't know about that, but I do know that MS
Office 2000 has good Unicode support, with a font covering the 2.1 characters.
As to the question of whether Unicode will help academic publishing, the answer
is absolutely yes. Standard, off-the-shelf programs can be used to produce text
that can be exchanged around the world with no loss of information. For more
information on the standard, the upcoming Unicode 3.0 character set, proposing
new characters, and future directions, seethe www.unicode.org. There are also
on-line code charts available there, such as for Spacing Modifiers
(http://charts.unicode.org/Unicode.charts/normal/U02B0.html).
Mark
"Dr. Josef W. Meri" wrote:
> Dear Mr. Davis:
>
> I am writing an essay on recent developments in scholarship in the field of
> Near Eastern Studies for a specialist journal and would like to know how the
> Unicode standard will simplify academic publishing through the use of
> Unicode-based Semitic transliteration fonts. I notice that in the Latin
> Extended Additional Code Chart that almost all the characters for the
> transliteration of Semitic languages are present. However the superscripted
> c (Arabic 'ayn) and reverse superscripted c (Arabic hamza) are not
> represented. These are essential characters. Is there a solution? Will
> the Latin Extended Additional Code Chart be standard with Microsoft's
> Windows 2000
> OS? How then will the Unicode standard make academic publishing using
> transliteration fonts easier? Thank you.
>
> Yours,
>
> Josef Meri
>
> Dr. Josef W. Meri, D.Phil.
> Research Fellow in Near Eastern Studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies
> University of California, Berkeley
>
> E-mail: meri@uclink4.berkeley.edu
>
> Correspondence address:
>
> Department of Near Eastern Studies
> 250 Barrows Hall
> U.C. Berkeley
> Berkeley, CA 94720-1940
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT