In message <199910221033.DAA27609@unicode.org>
Robert Herzog <Robert.Herzog@cern.ch> wrote:
> 3. The Greek seem to prefer the 'open phi' in their texts, which
> suggests to use 'open phi' at U+03C6, greek letter phi. For
> the mathematicians it does not matter if 'open phi' is at
> U+03C6 and 'closed phi' at U+03D5 (greek phi symbol) or the
> other way around as long as the assignment is fixed (for ever).
I would say that maths has a preference for the closed form as plain
"phi" - the open one is rarely used, in my experience. This is not as
important as getting the basic Greek alphabet in the right order though.
> 5. To keep Unicode unambigous (just about) AND follow Greek practice
> the 'open phi' glyph will be shown at U+03C6 and and the
> 'closed phi' at U+03D5 in Unicode 3.0.
> (I would have liked an unambigous name for the characters as well,
> eg. 'Greek small letter phi' and 'Greek small letter closed phi',
> but I guess this is politically [also technically?] impossible.)
Okay, fair enough. But...
>
> 6. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/glyphlist.txt
> is a GLYPHlist. Unless it is changed PostScript 'phi' means 'closed phi'
> and PS 'phi1' 'open phi', because that's how they appear in the Symbol font.
Who says the Symbol font is the reference? Those names apply to any font.
>
> 7. Hence from 5 and 6 follows for Unicode 3.0
> U+03C6 -> 'open phi' -> PostScript name 'phi1' and
> U+03D5 -> 'closed phi' -> PS name 'phi',
> which is different from the current Adobe glyphlist.
And will break current Greek fonts, which will have /phi, not /phi1.
And it means the Greek alphabet according to Adobe would be rather odd,
and wouldn't correspond with Unicode:
... /chi /delta /epsilon /phi1 /gamma /eta ...
I would suggest a better change would be to alter the encoding of the Symbol
font, not the Adobe Glyph List.
I can't see that it makes sense for /phi to be anything other than U+03C6.
-- Kevin Bracey, Senior Software Engineer Pace Micro Technology plc Tel: +44 (0) 1223 518566 645 Newmarket Road Fax: +44 (0) 1223 518526 Cambridge, CB5 8PB, United Kingdom WWW: http://www.acorn.co.uk/
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