Re: Lowercase numerals

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Fri Nov 22 2002 - 00:39:45 EST

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

    > So can it be summarized that figures (both arabic and latin) actually
    > come in only one flavor (upper or lowercase), the other being a
    > variant glyph, and both kinds of roman numerals being encoded for
    > reasons other than their semantic meaning?

    Both kinds of Roman numerals were encoded for one reason only:
    compatibility with existing standards, as Ken mentioned.

    > - As for arabic numerals, is there any convention which form (upper or
    > lowercase) is meant by U+048..U+057, and which requires special
    > treatment (variant selector)?

    You cannot apply a variation selector (U+FE0x, or soon U+E01xx) to the
    ASCII digits to request a different glyph, at least not until Unicode
    explicitly defines such a variant sequence.

    > - Should the two cases of roman numerals be distinguished by directly
    > using the UVs of one form or the other, or is it, for the sake of
    > consistency, preferrable to use UVs of only one of them (which?) and
    > the same UVs with a variant selector for the other, the font mapping
    > those variants to the other UV range?

    Roman numerals should be encoded using the letters in the basic Latin
    alphabet (upper- or lower-case). The only reason to use the characters
    in the range U+2160 - U+217F is to maintain compatibility with East
    Asian legacy standards. (The forms in the range U+2180 - U+2183 can be
    useful for paleographic purposes or giggle value.) Again, you are not
    permitted to invent your own variation-selector sequences.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California



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