Re: Lowercase numerals

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Nov 20 2002 - 00:31:54 EST

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    Thomas Lotze <thomas dot lotze at uni dash jena dot de> wrote:

    > Why is it that while there are both uppercase and lowercase roman
    > numerals in the Unicode character set (in the Number Forms range), no
    > lowercase arabic numerals (old-style or text figures) are encoded? If
    > they are regarded as presentation forms of the uppercase numerals (in
    > the Basic Latin range), why is this not the case for their roman
    > counterparts?

    Because oldstyle numerals aren't really "lowercase" in the same sense as
    small letters (though some typographers think of them that way; see
    [1]). They're just glyph variants of the uniform-height "lining"
    numerals, so yeah, it's a character-glyph thing.

    [1] http://www.fontsite.com/Pages/RulesOfType/ROT1297.html

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California



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