From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Fri Jan 17 2003 - 04:06:15 EST
Kenneth Whistler had written:
> 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.
I had replied:
> This will not work, as all 'mm' occurences are not written as
> m-overbar. [example snipped]
What I wanted to convey is that these abbreviations cannot be
globally applied to a text, as they are governed by morphological
issues (possibly also by typographical considerations, or may be
just arbitrary, as Ken had suggested). So, they should be somehow
coded in the text, whenever the user wants to preserve them, akin
to the notorious "Wachstube" vs. "Wachſtube" example. A glyph-
substitution automatism is not apt for this sort of happening.
John Hudson wrote:
> Ken's suggestion works fine, but only on discreetly selected runs of
> text. In other words, it would be up to the user *not* to apply the
> glyph substitution layout feature in the circumstances Otto describes.
> [...] Obviously this is not a plain text solution: markup is required.
On the contrary, I think this is a text feature and not a mere rendering
issue. Hence, I see two possible solutions:
- mark the abbreviation with a particular character (or character sequence),
e. g., U+006D U+0304 (abbr.) vs. U+006D U+006D (plain), or
- mark the plain (unabbreviated) occurence of the characters,
e. g., U+006D U+U+200B U+006D (plain) vs. U+006D U+006D (abbr.).
I'd prefer the former one, because it marks the deviation from the
prevalent usage.
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
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