From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 15:35:42 EST
Christoph Päper asked:
> 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.
>
> Should such a character be added to Unicode (or did I miss it)?
Neither.
Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations
should not be encoded as characters. 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.
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,
which is what the character encoding should be about.
If and only if an m-macron became a part of the accepted,
general orthography of German would it make sense to start
representing textual content in terms of such a character.
And in such a hypothetical future, you would use
<m, combining-macron>, because it already exists in
Unicode, and there is no point to encoding another
canonically equivalant precomposed character for that
sequence.
--Ken
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