From: Christoph Päper (christoph.paeper@tu-clausthal.de)
Date: Thu Jan 16 2003 - 01:01:52 EST
Kenneth Whistler:
> Christoph Päper asked:
>
>> writing "mm" as only one "m" with a macron above.
>
> Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations
> should not be encoded as characters.
Although I've got no proof for it, I was told that it has also been used in
print.
> The text should just be represented as "m" + "m". Then,
> if you wish to *render* such text in a font which mimics
> this style of handwriting and uses such abbreviations,
> then you would need the font to ligate "mm" sequences
> into a *glyph* showing an "m" with an overbar.
I constantly confuse "glyph", "character" etc., but wouldn't such a glyph
need a Unicode code point? "mm" sequences shouldn't be abreviated if they
appear in a compound word as the junction, thus you couldn't simply ligate
all.
I'm really not that much into font design / creation, so probably what you
say is perfectly reasonable.
> To do otherwise, either representing the plain text content
> as <m, combining-macron> or with a newly encoded m-macron
> character, would just distort the *content* of the text,
I agree on "m¯", but couldn't m-macron be said to be of equal meaning as
"mm", like U+017F approx. equals "s"?
> If and only if an m-macron became a part of the accepted,
> general orthography of German
You mean like "ß", the ligature of long-s and s?
> would it make sense to start
> representing textual content in terms of such a character.
It most probably never will, after it missed its chance early in the last
century--actually I've never seen such text myself, I was just curious.
I still wonder why there are m-acute and m-dot (old Irish Gaelic
orthography) in Latin Extended Additional and several other characters
(glyphs?) I've never seen and don't have a use note, but not m-macron. I
accept that there'll be no more new such "letters", but who forgot m- and
n-macron?
> And in such a hypothetical future, you would use <m,
> combining-macron>, because it already exists in Unicode,
But wouldn't that become either "m" or "m¯" instead of the correct "mm" when
converted to e.g. ISO-8859-1?
I guess in such a hypothetical future people would read "Rom¯el" for
"Rommel" almost fluently, but would definitely wonder about "Romel". Just
like "ß" can't be replaced by a single "s" but "ss" (or in certain cases
"\017Fs").
Btw.: Wouldn't things be easier, e.g. for automatic text transformation, if
there was an uppercase "ß" that looks just like double capital S?
Christoph Päper, who's now looking for the abbreviation of "-burg",
~"-b\0306g"
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