Re: Do you have these characters?

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Jun 27 2000 - 14:46:46 EDT


Brendan suggested:

> Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca@renault.fr> wrote:
> > What about the pairs
> > 0041;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
> <snip>
> > (which will be the one chosen by almost any software for this use).
>
> This is a little too simplistic: these characters have specific numeric
> properties and behaviors separate from those of A and B. The
> hexadecimal-ness of A through F is not encoded in Unicode, but these
> characters are commonly used as hex digits *and* in Latin-based scripts.
> However, these extra two characters are clearly not interchangeable with A
> and B, so I don't believe that using these is a complete solution.
>
> Perhaps a better solution is to use the Roman numerals X and XI (or x and
> xi) encoded in the number forms range (2150-218F).
>

I don't think this is the answer either. The plain answer to the
question in the subject line is "No". Unicode does not have these
two characters (dozenal digit 10 {a turned digit 2} and dozenal
digit 11 [a reversed digit 3}).

From the point of view of character encoding, I don't think it would
be correct to substitute out either the A/B usage (from hexadecimal
implementations) or the Roman numeral characters, although it is
easy to see how one could implement dozenal numerical formatting
with either (or for that matter, using "t" for ten and "e" for
eleven: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 t e 10 11 ... 19 1t 1e 20 ... etc. or
any other arbitrary choice of characters.

But if the Dozenal Society of Great Britain feels that its particular
usage of characters is important, then they (or anyone wishing to
sponsor their usage) could submit the appropriate Summary Proposal
Form for encoding characters to UTC and WG2 for consideration.

If these two characters pass a threshold test for being more than
idiosyncratic usage characters, then I am sure that in due time they
could be included in the Unicode repertoire.

--Ken



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