From: David J. Perry (perryd@telocity.com)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:59:50 EST
Christoph,
The convention of using a horizontal line to mark an abbreviation, often
the omission of m or n, goes back to the middle ages (if not earlier)
and was often used in early printed books; apparently it has lived on in
some handwriting, to judge from your post. There is no such m-macron
character in Unicode, and there will not be since no more precomposed
combinations will be added.
I think that U+0305, the combining overscore, is the right thing to use
for marking such abbreviations. I would like to get confirmation of
this from others on the list just to be sure. The only alternative
would be the combining macron, U+0304, which in many fonts would look
too short. Furthermore, I at least think of macrons as diacritics that
mainly go over vowels.
David
> I recently learned in <news:de.etc.sprache.deutsch> that
> there has been a tradition (in handwritten text more than in
> print) of writing "mm" as only one "m" with a macron above.
> I can't find any such character in Unicode, just U+1E3F and
> U+1E41. You could of course build something similar with
> "m"+U+0305 to resemble the look, but that won't become "mm"
> (just "m" or "m¯") after a conversion to e.g. ISO-8859-1.
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