From: Thomas Chan (tc31@cornell.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 07 2002 - 17:09:05 EST
On Thu, 7 Nov 2002, John Hudson wrote:
> At 13:07 11/7/2002, John Cowan wrote:
> >Wouldn't the glyph for the GETA SIGN be suitable as a .notdef glyph?
> >That seems to be just what GETA is for.
>
> Aha! Thank you, I'd never noticed that before. I think the GETA MARK would
> be ambiguous to a non CJK user, but I like the idea of the strong
> horizontal bars very much.
GETA MARK is also ambiguous to Chinese readers; an "M"-sized WHITE SQUARE
or WHITE CIRCLE (or LARGE CIRCLE) are more familiar.
I'm not familiar with how the GETA MARK is supposed to be used in
Japanese, but I hesitate to blur the possible distinction between
1) "there's a character here but you don't see it because the font is
missing a glyph", 2) "there's no character here for you to see because
what the author would like to put there is not encoded in Unicode", and
3) "there is expected to be something here (e.g., a letter, an ideograph,
etc) but the author doesn't even know what it is" (e.g., transcribing a
tablet with broken pieces or paper with insect damage, or
undecipherable/illegible source text). I don't think the distinction
between #2 and #3 need or should be standardized at this level--it is up
to a convention that the author should establish with the reader, as with
any specialized notation--but there is certainly a difference between #1
(author succeeds in writing but reader fails in viewing) and #2/#3 (author
fails in writing). Given the current white box/rectangle (or other
symbols) for notdef, if I see one of those, I really don't know if my font
is defective, or if the author volunatarily put it there to signify
something.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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